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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 




THE FOOD OF THE GODS 


AND HOW IT CAME TO EARTH 




















THE FOOD OF 
THE GODS 

AND HOW IT CAME TO EARTH 


BY 

H. G. WELLS 

\\ 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 
1904 


U8«AJfY OONUfTESS 
Twn Oa»**s Raws' ved 

SEP 21 1904 


^-JBwrsurht Entry 

o-eb ib.jqoy 

CLASS Ct XXo. Na 

96 6 ’?? 

copy t ■ 


TZ^ 

.W 4 -& 


Copyright, 1904, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 


Published September, 1904 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 
NEW YORK 


CONTENTS 


BOOK I 

THE DAWN OF THE FOOD 

CHAPTER THE FIRST 

PAGE 

The Discovery of the Food 3 

CHAPTER THE SECOND 

The Experimental Farm 17 

CHAPTER THE THIRD 

The Giant Rats 58 

CHAPTER THE FOURTH 

The Giant Children 104 

CHAPTER THE FIFTH 

The Minimificence of Mr. Bensington . . .141 


VI 


CONTENTS 


BOOK II 

THE FOOD IN THE VILLAGE 

CHAPTER THE FIRST 

PAGE 

The Coming of the Food 159 

CHAPTER THE SECOND 
The Brat Gigantic 185 


BOOK III 

THE HARVEST OF THE FOOD 

CHAPTER THE FIRST 

The Altered World 209 

CHAPTER THE SECOND 
The Giant Lovers 240 


CONTENTS vii 

CHAPTER THE THIRD 

PAGE 

Young Caddles in London. ....... 264 

CHAPTER THE FOURTH 

Redwood’s Two Days 282 

CHAPTER THE FIFTH 

The Giant Leaguer 308 


/ 


BOOK I 

THE DAWN OF THE FOOD 


i 















CHAPTER THE FIRST 


THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD 

I 

In the middle years of the nineteenth century there 
first became abundant in this strange world of ours 
a class of men, men tending for the most part to 
become elderly, who are called, and who are very 
properly called, but who dislike extremely to be 
called — “Scientists.” They dislike that word so 
much that from the columns of Nature , which was 
from the first their distinctive and characteristic 
paper, it is as carefully excluded as if it were — that 
other word which is the basis of all really bad lan- 
guage in this country. But the Great Public and 
its Press know better, and “Scientists” they are, and 
when they emerge to any sort of publicity, “distin- 
guished scientists” and “eminent scientists” and “well- 
known scientists” is the very least we call them. 

Certainly both Mr. Bensington and Professor 
Redwood quite merited any of these terms long 
before they came upon the marvellous discovery of 
which this story tells. Mr. Bensington was a Fel- 
low of the Royal Society and a former president of 
the Chemical Society, and Professor Redwood was 
3 


4 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


Professor of Physiology in the Bond Street College 
of the London University and he had been grossly 
libelled by the anti-vivisectionists time after time. 
And they had led lives of academic distinction from 
their very earliest youth. 

They were of course quite undistinguished look- 
ing men, as indeed all true Scientists are. There is 
more personal distinction about the mildest-mannered 
actor alive than there is about the entire Royal 
Society. Mr. Bensington was short and very, very 
bald, and he stooped slightly; he wore gold-rimmed 
spectacles and cloth boots that were abundantly cut 
open because of his numerous corns, and Professor 
Redwood was entirely ordinary in his appearance. 
Until they happened upon the Food of the Gods 
(as I must insist upon calling it) they led lives of 
such eminent and studious obscurity that it is hard 
to find anything whatever to tell the reader about 
them. 

Mr. Bensington won his spurs (if one may use 
such an expression of a gentleman in boots of slashed 
cloth) by his splendid researches upon the More 
Toxic Alkaloids, and Professor Redwood rose to 
eminence — I do not clearly remember how he rose 
to eminence! I know he was very eminent, and 
that’s all. Things of this sort grow. I fancy it was 
a voluminous work on Reaction Times with numer- 
ous plates of sphygmograph tracings (I write subject 
to correction) and an admirable new terminology, 
that did the thing for him. 


ch. i DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD 


5 


The general public saw little or nothing of either 
of these gentlemen. Sometimes at places like the 
Royal Institution and the Society of Arts it did in 
a sort of way see Mr. Bensington, or at least his 
blushing baldness and something of his collar and 
coat, and hear fragments of a lecture or paper that 
he imagined himself to be reading audibly; and once 
I remember — one midday in the vanished past — 
when the British Association was at Dover, coming 
on Section C. or D. or some such letter, which had 
taken up its quarters in a public-house, and follow- 
ing two serious-looking ladies with paper parcels, 
out of mere curiosity, through a door labelled 
“Billiards” and “Pool” into a scandalous darkness, 
broken only by a magic-lantern circle of Redwood’s 
tracings. 

I watched the lantern slides come and go, and 
listened to a voice (I forget what it was saying) 
which I believe was the voice of Professor Redwood, 
and there was a sizzling from the lantern and an- 
other sound that kept me there, still out of curiosity, 
until the lights were unexpectedly turned up. And 
then I perceived that this sound was the sound of 
the munching of buns and sandwiches and things 
that the assembled British Associates had come there 
to eat under cover of the magic-lantern darkness. 

And Redwood I remember went on talking all the 
time the lights were up and dabbing at the place 
where his diagram ought to have been visible on the 
screen — and so it was again so soon as the darkness 


6 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


was restored. I remember him then as a most ordi- 
nary, slightly nervous-looking dark man, with an 
air of being preoccupied with something else, and 
doing what he was doing just then under an unac- 
countable sense of duty. 

I heard Bensington also once — in the old days — 
at an educational conference in Bloomsbury. Like 
most eminent chemists and botanists, Mr. Bensing- 
ton was very authoritative upon teaching — though I 
am certain he would have been scared out of his wits 
by an average Board School class in half-an-hour — 
and so far as I can remember now, he was pro- 
pounding an improvement of Professor Armstrong’s 
Heuristic method, whereby at the cost of three or 
four hundred pounds’ worth of apparatus, a total 
neglect of all other studies and the undivided atten- 
tion of a teacher of exceptional gifts, an average 
child might with a peculiar sort of thumby thorough- 
ness learn in the course of ten or twelve years almost 
as much chemistry as one could get in one of those 
objectionable shilling text-books that were then so 
common. . . . 

Quite ordinary persons you perceive, both of them, 
outside their science. Or if anything on the unprac- 
tical side of ordinary. And that you will find is the 
case with “scientists” as a class all the world over. 
What there is great of them is an annoyance to their 
fellow scientists and a mystery to the general public, 
and what is not is evident. 

There is no doubt about what is not great, no race 


ch. i DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD 


7 


of men have such obvious littlenesses. They live in 
a narrow world so far as their human intercourse 
goes, their researches involve infinite attention and 
an almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over 
is not very much. To witness some queer, shy, mis- 
shapen, grey-headed, self-important, little discoverer 
of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the 
wide ribbon of some order of chivalry and holding 
a reception of his fellow men, or to read the anguish 
of Nature at the “neglect of science” when the angel 
of the birthday honours passes the Royal Society by, 
or to listen to one indefatigable lichenologist com- 
menting on the work of another indefatigable lichen- 
ologist, such things force one to realise the unfal- 
tering littleness of men. 

And withal the reef of Science that these little 
“scientists” built and are yet building is so wonder- 
ful, so portentous, so full of mysterious half-shapen 
promises for the mighty future of man! They do 
not seem to realise the things they are doing! No 
doubt long ago, even Mr. Bensington, when he chose 
this calling, when he consecrated his life to the alka- 
loids and their kindred compounds, had some inkling 
of the vision — more than an inkling. Without some 
such inspiration, for such glories and positions only 
as a “scientist” may expect, what young man would 
have given his life to such work, as young men do ? 
No, they must have seen the glory, they must have 
had the vision, but so near that it has blinded them. 
The splendour has blinded them, mercifully, so that 


8 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


for the rest of their lives they can hold the lights of 
knowledge in comfort — that we may see ! 

And perhaps it accounts for Redwood’s touch of 
preoccupation, that — there can be no doubt of it now 
— he among his fellows was different, he was dif- 
ferent inasmuch as something of the vision still lin- 
gered in his eyes. 

II 

The Food of the Gods I call it, this substance that 
Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood made be- 
tween them; and having regard now to what it has 
already done and all that it is certainly going to do, 
there is surely no exaggeration in the name. So I shall 
continue to call it so therefore throughout my story. 
But Mr. Bensington would no more have called it 
that in cold blood than he would have gone out from 
his flat in Sloane Street clad in regal scarlet and a 
wreath of laurel. The phrase was a mere first cry 
of astonishment from him. He called it the Food 
of the Gods, in his enthusiasm and for an hour or 
so at the most altogether. After that he decided he 
was being absurd. When he first thought of the 
thing he saw, as it were, a vista of enormous possi- 
bilities — literally enormous possibilities, but upon this 
dazzling vista, after one stare of amazement, he 
resolutely shut his eyes, even as a conscientious “sci- 
entist” should. After that, the Food of the Gods 
sounded blatant to the pitch of indecency. He was 
surprised he had used the expression. Yet for all 


ch. i DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD 


9 

that something of that clear-eyed moment hung 
about him and broke out ever and again. . . . 

“Really, you know,” he said, rubbing his hands 
together and laughing nervously, “it has more than 
a theoretical interest. 

“For example,” he confided, bringing his face close 
to the Professor’s and dropping to an undertone; “it 
would perhaps, if suitably handled, sell. . . . 

“Precisely,” he said, walking away — “as a Food. 
Or at least a food ingredient. 

“Assuming of course that it is palatable. A thing 
we cannot know till we have prepared it.” 

He turned upon the hearthrug, and studied the 
carefully designed slits upon his cloth shoes. 

“Name?” he said, looking up in response to an 
inquiry. “For my part I incline to the good old 
classical allusion. It — it makes Science res — . Gives 
it a touch of old-fashioned dignity. I have been 
thinking . . . I ‘ don’t know if you will think 
it absurd of me. ... A little fancy is surely 
occasionally permissible. . . . Herakleophorbia. 

Eh? The nutrition of a possible Hercules? You 
know it might . . 

“Of course if you think not ” 

Redwood reflected with his eyes on the fire and 
made no objection. 

“You think it would do?” 

Redwood moved his head gravely. 

“It might be Titanophorbia, you know. Food of 
Titans. . . . You prefer the former? 


IO 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“You’re quite sure you don’t think it a little 


“No.” 

“Ah! I’m glad.” 

And so they called it Herakleophorbia through- 
out their investigations, and in their report — the 
report that was never published, because of the un- 
expected developments that upset all their arrange- 
ments, it is invariably written in that way. There 
were three kindred substances prepared before they 
hit on the one their speculations had foretold, and 
these they spoke of as Herakleophorbia I., Herakleo- 
phorbia II., and Herakleophorbia III. It is He- 
rakleophorbia IV. which I — insisting upon Bensing- 
ton’s original name — call here the Food of the Gods. 

Ill 

The idea was Mr. Bensington’s. But as it was 
suggested to him by one of Professor Redwood’s 
contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, he 
very properly consulted that gentleman before he car- 
ried it further. Besides which it was, as a research, 
a physiological, quite as much as a chemical inquiry. 

Professor Redwood was one of those scientific 
men who are addicted to tracings and curves. You 
are familiar — if you are at all the sort of reader I 
like — with the sort of scientific paper I mean. It 
is a paper you cannot make head nor tail of, and at 
the end come five or six long folded diagrams that 


ch. i DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD 


ii 


open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashes 
of lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things 
called “smoothed curves” set up on ordinates and 
rooting in abscissae — and things like that. You 
puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with 
the suspicion that not only do you not understand 
it but that the author does not understand it either. 
But really you know many of these scientific people 
understand the meaning of their own papers quite 
well, it is simply a defect of expression that raises 
the obstacle between us. 

I am inclined to think that Redwood thought in 
tracings and curves. And after his monumental 
work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific reader 
is exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and 
everything will be as clear as daylight) Redwood 
began to turn out smoothed curves and sphygmo- 
grapheries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers 
upon Growth that really gave Mr. Bensington his 
idea. 

Redwood, you know, had been measuring grow- 
ing things of all sorts, kittens, puppies, sunflowers, 
mushrooms, bean plants and (until his wife put a 
stop to it) his baby, and he showed that growth 
went on, not at a regular pace, or, as he put it, so 



1 1 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


but with bursts and intermissions of this sort, 



and that apparently nothing grew regularly and 
steadily, and so far as he could make out nothing 
could grow regularly and steadily; it was as if every 
living thing had first to accumulate force to grow, 
grew with vigour only for a time and then had to 
wait for a space before it could go on growing again. 
And in the muffled and highly technical language of 
the really careful “scientist,” Redwood suggested 
that the process of growth probably demanded the 
presence of a considerable quantity of some neces- 
sary substance in the blood that was only formed 
very slowly, and that when this substance was used 
up by growth, it was only very slowly replaced, and 
that meanwhile the organism had to mark time. 
He compared his unknown substance to oil in ma- 
chinery. A growing animal was rather like an engine, 
he suggested, that can move a certain distance and 
must then be oiled before it can run again. (“But 
why shouldn’t one oil the engine from without?” 
said Mr. Bensington, when he read the paper.) 
And all this, said Redwood, with the delightful ner- 
vous inconsecutiveness of his class, might very prob- 
ably be found to throw a light upon the mystery of 
certain of the ductless glands. As though they had 
anything to do with it at all ! 


ch. i DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD 


i3 


In a subsequent communication Redwood went 
further. He gave a perfect Brock’s benefit of dia- 
grams — exactly like rocket trajectories they were, 
and the gist of it — so far as it had any gist — was 
that the blood of puppies and kittens and the sap of 
sunflowers and the juice of mushrooms in what he 
called the “growing phase” differed in the proportion 
of certain elements from their blood and sap on the 
days when they were not particularly growing. 

And when Mr. Bensington, after holding the dia- 
grams sideways and upside down, began to see what 
this difference was, a great amazement came upon 
him. Because, you see, the difference might prob- 
ably be due to the presence of just the very substance 
he had recently been trying to isolate in his researches 
upon such alkaloids as are most stimulating to the 
nervous system. He put down Redwood’s paper on 
the patent reading-desk that swung inconveniently 
from his arm-chair, took off his gold-rimmed spec- 
tacles, breathed on them and wiped them very care- 
fully. 

“By Jove!” said Mr. Bensington. 

Then replacing his spectacles again he turned to 
the patent reading-desk, which immediately, as his 
elbow came against its arm, gave a coquettish squeak 
and deposited the paper, with all its diagrams in a 
dispersed and crumpled state, on the floor. “By 
Jove!” said Mr. Bensington, straining his stomach 
over the arm-chair with a patient disregard of the 
habits of this convenience, and then, finding the 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


14 

pamphlet still out of reach, he went down on all fours 
in pursuit. It was on the floor that the idea of call- 
ing it the Food of the Gods came to him. . . . 

For you see, if he was right and Redwood was 
right, then by injecting or administering this new 
substance of his in food, he would do away with 
the “resting phase,” and instead of growth going on 
in this fashion 


it would (if you follow me) go thus 



The night after his conversation with Redwood 
Mr. Bensington could scarcely sleep a wink. He 
did seem once to get into a sort of doze, but it was 
only for a moment, and then he dreamt he had dug 
a deep hole into the earth and poured in tons and 
tons of the Food of the Gods and the earth was 
swelling and swelling, and all the boundaries of the 
countries were bursting, and the Royal Geographical 
Society was all at work like one great guild of tailors 
letting out the equator. 


ch. i DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD 


*5 


That of course was a ridiculous dream, but it 
shows the state of mental excitement into which Mr. 
Bensington got and the real value he attached to his 
idea, much better than any of the things he said or 
did when he was awake and on his guard. Or I 
should not have mentioned it, because as a general 
rule I do not think it is at all interesting for people 
to tell each other about their dreams. 

By a singular coincidence Redwood also had a 
dream that night, and his dream was this: — 


It was a diagram done in fire upon a long scroll 
of the abyss. And he (Redwood) was standing on 
a planet before a sort of black platform lecturing 
about the new sort of growth that was now possible, 
to the More than Royal Institution of Primordial 
Forces, forces which had always previously, even in 
the growth of races, empires, planetary systems and 
worlds, gone so: — 



And even in some cases so: — 



And he was explaining to them quite lucidly and 
convincingly that these slow, these even retrogressive 


1 6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

methods would be very speedily quite put out of 
fashion by his discovery. 

Ridiculous of course ! But that too shows 

That either dream is to be regarded as in any way 
significant or prophetic beyond what I have categor- 
ically said, I do not for one moment suggest. 


CHAPTER THE SECOND 


THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 

I 

Mr. Bensington proposed originally to try this 
stuff, so soon as he was really able to prepare it, upon 
tadpoles. One always does try this sort of thing 
upon tadpoles to begin with; this being what tad- 
poles are for. And it was agreed that he should con- 
duct the experiments and not Redwood, because Red- 
wood’s laboratory was occupied with the ballistic ap- 
paratus and animals necessary for an investigation 
into the DiurnalA^riation in the Butting Frequency 
of the Young Bull Calf, an investigation that was 
yielding curves of an abnormal and very perplexing 
sort, and the presence of glass globes of tadpoles 
was extremely undesirable while this particular re- 
search was in progress. 

But when Mr. Bensington conveyed to his cousin 
Jane something of what he had in mind, she put a 
prompt veto upon the importation of any consider- 
able number of tadpoles, or any such experimental 
creatures, into their flat. She had no objection what- 
ever to his use of one of the rooms of the flat for the 
purposes of a non-explosive chemistry that, so far as 
17 


i8 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


she was concerned, came to nothing, she let him have 
a gas furnace and a sink and a dust-tight cupboard 
of refuge from the weekly storm of cleaning she 
would not forego. And having known people ad- 
dicted to drink, she regarded his solicitude for dis- 
tinction in learned societies as an excellent substitute 
for the coarser form of depravity. But any sort of 
living things in quantity, “wriggly” as they were 
bound to be alive, and “smelly” dead, she could not 
and would not abide. She said these things were cer- 
tain to be unhealthy, and Bensington was notoriously 
a delicate man — it was nonsense to say he wasn’t. 
And when Bensington tried to make the enormous 
importance of this possible discovery clear, she said 
that it was all very well, but if she consented to his 
making everything nasty and unwholesome in the 
place (and that was what it all came to) then she 
was certain he would be the first to complain. 

And Mr. Bensington went up and down the room, 
regardless of his corns, and spoke to her quite firmly 
and angrily without the slightest effect. He said that 
nothing ought to stand in the way of the Advance- 
ment of Science, and she said that the Advancement 
of Science was one thing and having a lot of tadpoles 
in a flat was another; he said that in Germany it was 
an ascertained fact that a man with an idea like his 
would at once have twenty thousand properly-fitted 
cubic feet of laboratory placed at his disposal, and 
she said she was glad and always had been glad that 
she was not a German; he said that it would make 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


I 9 

him famous forever, and she said it was much more 
likely to make him ill to have a lot of tadpoles in a 
flat like theirs; he said he was master in his own 
house, and she said that rather than wait on a lot of 
tadpoles she’d go as matron to a school ; and then he 
asked her to be reasonable, and she asked him to be 
reasonable then and give up all this about tadpoles; 
and he said she might respect his ideas, and she said 
not if they were smelly she wouldn’t, and then he 
gave way completely and said — in spite of the classi- 
cal remarks of Huxley upon the subject — a bad 
word. Not a very bad word it was, but bad enough. 

And after that she was greatly offended and had 
to be apologised to, and the prospect of ever trying 
the Food of the Gods upon tadpoles in their flat at 
any rate vanished completely in the apology. 

So Bensington had to consider some other way of 
carrying out these experiments in feeding that would 
be necessary to demonstrate his discovery, so soon as 
he had his substance isolated and prepared. For 
some days he meditated upon the possibility of 
boarding out his tadpoles with some trustworthy per- 
son, and then the chance sight of the phrase in a 
newspaper turned his thoughts to an Experimental 
Farm. 

And chicks. Directly he thought of it, he thought 
of it as a poultry farm. He was suddenly taken with 
a vision of wildly growing chicks. He conceived a 
picture of coops and runs, outsize and still more out- 
size coops, and runs progressively larger. Chicks 


20 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


are so accessible, so easily fed and observed, so much 
drier to handle and measure, that for his purpose 
tadpoles seemed to him now, in comparison with 
them, quite wild and uncontrollable beasts. He was 
quite puzzled to understand why he had not thought 
of chicks instead of tadpoles from the beginning. 
Among other things it would have saved all this 
trouble with his cousin Jane. And when he sug- 
gested this to Redwood, Redwood quite agreed with 
him. 

Redwood said that in working so much upon need- 
lessly small animals he was convinced experimental 
physiologists made a great mistake. It is exactly like 
making experiments in chemistry with an insufficient 
quantity of material; errors of observation and man- 
ipulation become disproportionately large. It was 
of extreme importance just at present that scientific 
men should assert their right to have their material 
big. That was why he was doing his present series 
of experiments at the Bond Street College upon Bull 
Calves, in spite of a certain amount of inconvenience 
to the students and professors of other subjects 
caused by their incidental levity in the corridors. But 
the curves he was getting were quite exceptionally in- 
teresting, and would, when published, amply justify 
his choice. For his own part, were it not for the in- 
adequate endowment of science in this country, he 
would never, if he could avoid it, work on anything 
smaller than a whale. But a Public Vivarium on a 
sufficient scale to render this possible was, he feared, 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


21 


at present, in this country at any rate, a Utopian de- 
mand. In Germany Etc. 

As Redwood’s bull calves needed his daily atten- 
tion, the selection and equipment of the Experimen- 
tal Farm fell largely on Bensington. The entire cost 
also, was, it was understood, to be defrayed by Ben- 
sington, at least until a grant could be obtained. Ac- 
cordingly he alternated his work in the laboratory 
of his flat with farm hunting up and down the lines 
that run southward out of London, and his peering 
spectacles, his simple baldness, and his lacerated 
cloth shoes filled the owners of numerous undesirable 
properties with vain hopes. And he advertised in 
several daily papers and Nature for a responsible 
couple (married), punctual, active, and used to poul- 
try, to take entire charge of an Experimental Farm 
of three acres. 

He found the place he seemed in need of at Hick- 
leybrow, near Urshot in Kent. It was a queer little 
isolated place, in a dell surrounded by old pine woods 
that were black and forbidding at night. A humped 
shoulder of down cut it off from the sunset, and a 
gaunt well with a shattered penthouse dwarfed the 
dwelling. The little house was creeperless, several 
windows were broken, and the cart shed had a black 
shadow at midday. It was a mile and a half from 
the end house of the village, and its loneliness was 
very doubtfully relieved by an ambiguous family of 
echoes. 

The place impressed Bensington as being emi- 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


22 

nently adapted to the requirements of scientific re- 
search. He walked over the premises sketching out 
coops and runs with a sweeping arm, and he found 
the kitchen capable of accommodating a series of in- 
cubators and foster mothers with the very minimum 
of alteration. He took the place there and then ; on 
his way back to London he stopped at Dunton Green 
and closed with an eligible couple that had answered 
his advertisements, and that same evening he suc- 
ceeded in isolating a sufficient quantity of Herakleo- 
phorbia I. to more than justify these engagements. 

The eligible couple who were destined under Mr. 
Bensington to be the first almoners on earth of the 
Food of the Gods, were not only very perceptibly 
aged, but also extremely dirty. This latter point 
Mr. Bensington did not observe, because nothing de- 
stroys the powers of general observation quite so 
much as a life of experimental science. They were 
named Skinner, Mr. and Mrs. Skinner, and Mr. 
Bensington interviewed them in a small room with 
hermetically sealed windows, a spotted overmantel 
looking-glass, and some ailing calceolarias. 

Mrs. Skinner was a very little old woman, capless, 
with dirty white hair drawn back very very tightly 
from a face that had begun by being chiefly, and 
was now, through the loss of teeth and chin, and the 
wrinkling up of everything else, ending by being al- 
most exclusively — nose. She was dressed in slate 
colour (so far as her dress had any colour) slashed 
in one place with red flannel. She let him in and 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


2 3 


talked to him guardedly and peered at him round 
and over her nose, while Mr. Skinner she alleged 
made some alteration in his toilette. She had one 
tooth that got into her articulation, and she held her 
two long wrinkled hands nervously together. She 
told Mr. Bensington that she had managed fowls for 
years, and knew all about incubators; in fact, they 
themselves had run a Poultry Farm at one time, and 
it had only failed at last through the want of pupils. 
“It’s the pupils as pay,” said Mrs. Skinner. 

Mr. Skinner, when he appeared, was a large-faced 
man, with a lisp and a squint that made him look 
over the top of your head, slashed slippers that ap- 
pealed to Mr. Bensington’s sympathies, and a mani- 
fest shortness of buttons. He held his coat and shirt 
together with one hand and traced patterns on the 
black and gold tablecloth with the index finger of the 
other, while his disengaged eye watched Mr. Ben- 
sington’s sword of Damocles, so to speak, with an ex- 
pression of sad detachment. “You don’t want to run 
thith Farm for profit. No, Thir. Ith all the thame, 
Thir. Ekthperimenth ! Prethithely.” 

He said they could go to the farm at once. He 
was doing nothing at Dunton Green except a little 
tailoring. “It ithn’t the thmart plathe I thought it 
wath, and what I get ithent thkarthely worth hav- 
ing,” he said, “tho that if ith any convenienth to you 
for uth to come. . . 

And in a week Mr. and Mrs. Skinner were in- 
stalled in the farm, and the jobbing carpenter from 


24 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


Hickleybrow was diversifying the task of erecting 
runs and henhouses with a systematic discussion of 
Mr. Bensington. 

“I haven’t theen much of ’im yet,” said Mr. Skin- 
ner. “But as far as I can make ’im out ’e theems to 
be a thtewpid o’ fool.” 

“/ thought ’e seemed a bit dotty,” said the carpen- 
ter from Hickleybrow. 

“ ’E fanthieth ’imself about poultry,” said Mr. 
Skinner. “O my goodneth! You’d think nobody 
knew nothin’ about poultry thept ’im.” 

“ ’E looks like a ’en,” said the carpenter from 
Hickleybrow; “what with them spectacles of ’is.” 

Mr. Skinner came closer to the carpenter from 
Hickleybrow, and spoke in a confidential manner, 
and one sad eye regarded the distant village, and one 
was bright and wicked. “Got to be meathured every 
blethed day — every blethed ’en, ’e thays. Tho’ as to 
thee they grow properly. What oh . . . eh? 

Every blethed ’en — every blethed day.” 

And Mr. Skinner put up his hand to laugh behind 
it in a refined and contagious manner, and humped 
his shoulders very much — and only the other eye of 
him failed to participate in his laughter. Then doubt- 
ing if the carpenter had quite got the point of it, he 
repeated in a penetrating whisper: “Meathured! ” 

“ ’E’s worse than our old guvnor; I’m dratted if 
’e ain’t,” said the carpenter from Hickleybrow. 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


2 S 


II 

Experimental work is the most tedious thing in 
the world (unless it be the reports of it in the Philo- 
sophical Transactions ) , and it seemed a long time to 
Mr. Bensington before his first dream of enormous 
possibilities was replaced by a crumb of realisation. 
He had taken the Experimental Farm in October, 
and it was May before the first inklings of success 
began. Herakleophorbia I. and II. and III. had to 
be tried, and failed; there was trouble with the rats of 
the Experimental Farm, and there was trouble with 
the Skinners. The only way to get Skinner to do any- 
thing he was told to do was to dismiss him. Then 
he would rub his unshaven chin — he was always un- 
shaven most miraculously and yet never bearded — 
with a flattened hand, and look at Mr. Bensington 
with one eye, and over him with the other, and say, 
“Oo, of courthe, Thir — if you’re theriouth ... !” 

But at last success dawned. And its herald was a 
letter in the long slender handwriting of Mr. Skin- 
ner. 


“The new Brood are out,” wrote Mr. Skinner, 
“and don’t quite like the look of them. Growing 
very rank — quite unlike what the similar lot was be- 
fore your last directions was given. The last, before 
the cat got them, was a very nice, stocky chick, but 
these are Growing like thistles. I never saw. They 


26 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


peck so hard, striking above boot top, that am unable 
to give exact Measures as requested. They are reg- 
ular Giants, and eating as such. We shall want more 
corn very soon, for you never saw such chicks to eat. 
Bigger than Bantams. Going on at this rate, they 
ought to be a bird for show, rank as they are. Plym- 
outh Rocks won’t be in it. Had a scare last night 
thinking that cat was at them, and when I looked 
out at the window could have sworn I see her getting 
in under the wire. The chicks was all awake and 
pecking about hungry when I went out, but could not 
see anything of the cat. So gave them a peck of corn, 
and fastened up safe. Shall be glad to know if the 
Feeding to be continued as directed. Food you mixed 
is pretty near all gone, and do not like to mix any 
more myself on account of the accident with the pud- 
ding. With best wishes from us both, and soliciting 
continuance of esteemed favours, 

“Respectfully yours, 

“Alfred Newton Skinner.” 

The allusion towards the end referred to a milk 
pudding with which some Herakleophorbia II. had 
got itself mixed, with painful and very nearly fatal 
results to the Skinners. 

But Mr. Bensington, reading between the lines, 
saw in this rankness of growth the attainment of his 
long sought goal. The next morning he alighted at 
Urshot station, and in the bag in his hand he carried, 
sealed in three tins, a supply of the Food of the Gods 
sufficient for all the chicks in Kent. 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 27 

It was a bright and beautiful morning late in May, 
and his corns were so much better that he resolved 
to walk through Hickleybrow to his farm. It was 
three miles and a half altogether, through the park 
and village, and then along the green glades of the 
Hickleybrow preserves. The trees were all dusted 
with the green spangles of high spring, the hedges 
were full of stitchwort and campion, and the woods 
of blue hyacinths and purple orchid, and every- 
where there was a great noise of birds, thrushes, 
blackbirds, robins, finches, and many more, and in 
one warm corner of the park some bracken was un- 
rolling, and there was a leaping and rushing of fal- 
low deer. 

These things brought back to Mr. Bensington his 
early and forgotten delight in life; before him the 
promise of his discovery grew bright and joyful, and 
it seemed to him that indeed he must have come upon 
the happiest day in his life. And when in the sunlit 
run by the sandy bank under the shadow of the pine 
trees he saw the chicks that had eaten the food he 
had mixed for them, gigantic and gawky, bigger al- 
ready than many a hen that is married and settled, 
and still growing, still in their first soft yellow plu- 
mage (just faintly marked with brown along the 
back), he knew indeed that his happiest day had 
come. 

At Mr. Skinner’s urgency he went into the run, 
but after he had been pecked through the cracks in 
his shoes once or twice he got out again, and watched 
these monsters through the wire netting. He peered 


a8 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

close to the netting, and followed their movements 
as though he had never seen a chick before in his 
life. 

“Whath they’ll be when they’re grown up ith im- 
pothible to think,” said Mr. Skinner. 

“Big as a horse,” said Mr. Bensington. 

“Pretty near,” said Mr. Skinner. 

“Several people could dine off a wing!” said Mr. 
Bensington. “They’d cut up into joints like butcher’s 
meat.” 

“They won’t go on growing at thith pathe 
though,” said Mr. Skinner. 

“No?” said Mr. Bensington. 

“No,” said Mr. Skinner. “I know thith thort. 
They begin rank, but they don’t go on, bleth you ! 
No.” 

There was a pause. 

“Itth management,” said Mr. Skinner modestly. 

Mr. Bensington turned his glasses on him sud- 
denly. 

“We got ’em almoth ath big at the other plathe,” 
said Mr. Skinner, with his better eye piously uplifted 
and letting himself go a little; “me and the mithith.” 

Mr. Bensington made his usual general inspection 
of the premises, but he speedily returned to the new 
run. It was, you know, in truth ever so much more 
than he had dared to expect. The course of science 
is so tortuous and so slow; after the clear promises 
and before the practical realisation arrives there 
comes almost always year after year of intricate con- 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


29 


trivance, and here — here was the Foods of the Gods 
arriving after less than a year of testing! It seemed 
too good — too good. That Hope Deferred which is 
the daily food of the scientific imagination was to be 
his no more ! So at least it seemed to him then. He 
came back and stared at these stupendous chicks of 
his time after time. 

“Let me see,” he said. “They’re ten days old. 
And by the side of an ordinary chick I should fancy 
— about six or seven times as big. . . .” 

“Itth about time we artht for a rithe in thkrew,” 
said Mr. Skinner to his wife. “He’th ath pleathed 
ath Punth about the way we got thothe chickth on in 
the further run — pleathed ath Punth he ith.” 

He bent confidentially towards her. “Thinkth 
it’th that old food of hith,” he said behind his hand, 
and made a noise of suppressed laughter in his 
pharyngeal cavity. 

Mr. Bensington was indeed a happy man that day. 
He was in no mood to find fault with details of man- 
agement. The bright day certainly brought out the 
accumulating slovenliness of the Skinner couple more 
vividly than he had ever seen it before. But his 
comments were of the gentlest. The fencing of 
many of the runs was out of order, but he seemed 
to consider it quite satisfactory when Mr. Skinner 
explained that it was a “fokth or a dog or thome- 
thing did it. He pointed out that the incubator had 
not been cleaned. 

“That it asn’t, Sir,” said Mrs. Skinner with her 


3 o THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

arms folded, smiling coyly behind her nose. “We 
don’t seem to have had time to clean it not since we 
been ’ere. . . 

He went upstairs to see some ratholes that Skin- 
ner said would justify a trap — they certainly were 
enormous — and discovered that the room in which 
the Food of the Gods was mixed with meal and bran 
was in a quite disgraceful disorder. The Skinners were 
the sort of people who find a use for cracked saucers 
and old cans and pickle jars and mustard boxes, and 
the place was littered with these. In one corner a 
great pile of apples that Skinner had saved was de- 
caying, and from a nail in the sloping part of the 
ceiling, hung several rabbit skins, upon which he pro- 
posed to test his gift as a furrier. (“There ithn’t 
mutth about furth and thingth that I don’t know,” 
said Skinner.) 

Mr. Bensington certainly sniffed critically at this 
disorder, but he made no unnecessary fuss, and even 
when he found a wasp regaling itself in a gallipot 
half full of Herakleophorbia IV., he simply re- 
marked mildly that his substance was better sealed 
from the damp than exposed to the air in that man- 
ner. 

And he turned from these things at once to re- 
mark — what had been for some time in his mind — 
“I think, Skinner — you know I shall kill one of these 
chicks — as a specimen. I think we will kill it this 
afternoon, and I will take it back with me to Lon- 
don.” 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


3 1 

He pretended to peer into another gallipot and 
then took off his spectacles to wipe them. 

“I should like,” he said, “I should like very much 
to have some relic — some memento — of this particu- 
lar brood at this particular day. 

“By the bye,” he said, “you don’t give those little 
chicks meat?” 

“Oh ! no, Thir,” said Skinner, “I can athure you, 
Thir, we know far too much about the management 
of fowlth of all dethcriptionth to do anything of that 
thort.” 

“Quite sure you don’t thrown your dinner ref- 
use — I thought I noticed the bones of a rabbit scat- 
tered about the far corner of the run ” 

But when they came to look at them they found 
they were the larger bones of a cat picked very clean 
and dry. 


Ill 

“That’s no chick,” said Mr. Bensington’s cousin 
Jane. 

“Well, I should think I knew a chick when I saw 
it,” said Mr. Bensington’s cousin Jane hotly. 

“It’s too big for a chick, for one thing, and be- 
sides you can see perfectly well it isn’t a chick. 

“It’s more like a bustard than a chick.” 

“For my part,” said Redwood, reluctantly allow- 
ing Bensington to drag him into the argument, “I 
must confess that, considering all the evidence ” 


3 ^ 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“Oh! if you do that said Mr. Bensington’s 
cousin Jane, “instead of using your eyes like a sensi- 
ble person ” 

“Well, but really, Miss Bensington !” 

“Oh! Go on /” said cousin Jane. “You men are 
all alike.” 

“Considering all the evidence, this certainly falls 
within the definition — no doubt it’s abnormal and 
hypertrophied, but still — especially since it was 
hatched from the egg of a normal hen — Yes, I think, 
Miss Bensington, I must admit — this, so far as one 
can call it anything, is a sort of chick.” 

“You mean it’s a chick?” said cousin Jane. 

“I think it’s a chick,” said Redwood. 

“What nonsense !” said Mr. Bensington’s cousin 
Jane, and “Oh!” directed at Redwood’s head, “I 
haven’t patience with you,” and then suddenly she 
turned about and went out of the room with a slam. 

“And it’s a very great relief for me to see it, too, 
Bensington,” said Redwood, when the reverberation 
of the slam had died away. “In spite of its being so 
big.” 

Without any urgency from Mr. Bensington he sat 
down in the low arm-chair by the fire and confessed 
to proceedings that even in an unscientific man would 
have been indiscreet. “You will think it very rash 
of me, Bensington, I know,” he said, “but the fact is 
I put a little — not very much of it — but some — into 
Baby’s bottle very nearly a week ago !” 

“But suppose — !” cried Mr. Bensington. 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


33 

“I know,” said Redwood, and glanced at the giant 
chick upon the plate on the table. 

“It’s turned out all right, thank goodness,” and 
he felt in his pocket for his cigarettes. 

He gave fragmentary details. “Poor little chap 
wasn’t putting on weight . . . desperately 

anxious. — Winkles, a frightful duffer . . . for- 
mer pupil of mine ... no good. . . . 

Mrs. Redwood — unmitigated confidence in Winkles. 

You know, man with a manner like a cliff 
— towering. ... No confidence in me, of 
course. . . . Taught Winkles. . . . Scarcely 

allowed in the nursery. . . . Something had to 

be done. . . . Slipped in while the nurse was at 

breakfast . . . got at the bottle.” 

“But he’ll grow,” said Mr. Bensington. 

“He’s growing. Twenty-seven ounces last week. 

. You should hear Winkles. It’s manage- 
ment, he said.” 

“Dear me! That’s what Skinner says!” 

Redwood looked at the chick again. “The bother 
is to keep it up,” he said. “They won’t trust me in 
the nursery alone, because I tried to get a growth 
curve out of Georgina Phyllis — you know — and how 
I’m to give him a second dose ” 

“Need you?” 

“He’s been crying two days — can’t get on with his 
ordinary food again, anyhow. He wants some more 
now.” 

“Tell Winkles.” 


34 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“Hang Winkles !” said Redwood. 

“You might get at Winkles and give him powders 
to give the child ” 

“That’s about what I shall have to do,” said Red- 
wood, resting his chin on his fist and staring into the 
fire. 

Bensington stood for a space smoothing the down 
on the breast of the giant chick. “They will be mon- 
strous fowls,” he said. 

“They will,” said Redwood, still with his eyes on 
the glow. 

“Big as horses,” said Bensington. 

“Bigger,” said Redwood. “That’s just it!” 

Bensington turned away from the specimen. “Red- 
wood,” he said, “these fowls are going to create a 
sensation.” 

Redwood nodded his head at the fire. 

“And by Jove!” said Bensington, coming round 
suddenly with a flash in his spectacles, “so will your 
little boy!” 

“That’s just what I’m thinking of,” said Red- 
wood. 

He sat back, sighed, threw his unconsumed cigar- 
ette into the fire and thrust his hands deep into his 
trouser pockets. “That’s precisely what I’m think- 
ing of. This Herakleophorbia is going to be queer 
stuff to handle. The pace that chick must have 
grown at !” 

“A little boy growing at that pace,” said Mr. Ben- 
sington slowly, and stared at the chick as he spoke. 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 35 

“I say l” said Bensington, “he’ll be Big.” 

“I shall give him diminishing doses,” said Red- 
wood. “Or at any rate Winkles will.” 

“It’s rather too much of an experiment.” 

“Much.” 

“Yet still, you know, I must confess — . . . 

Some baby will sooner or later have to try it.” 

“Oh, we’ll try it on some baby — certainly.” 

“Exactly so,” said Bensington, and came and 
stood on the hearthrug and took off his spectacles to 
wipe them. 

“Until I saw these chicks, Redwood, I don’t think 
I began to realise — anything — of the possibilities of 
what we were making. It’s only beginning to dawn 
upon me . . . the possible consequences. . . .” 

And even then, you know, Mr. Bensington was 
far from any conception of the mine that little train 
would fire. 


IV 

That happened early in June. For some weeks 
Bensington was kept from revisiting the Experi- 
mental Farm by a severe imaginary catarrh, and 
one necessary flying visit was made by Redwood. He 
returned an even more anxious-looking parent than 
he had gone. Altogether there were seven weeks of 
steady, uninterrupted growth. 

And then the Wasps began their career. 

It was late in July and nearly a week before the 


3 6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

hens escaped from Hickleybrow that the first of the 
big wasps was killed. The report of it appeared in 
several papers, but I do not know whether the news 
reached Mr. Bensington, much less whether he con- 
nected it with the general laxity of method that pre- 
vailed in the Experimental Farm. 

There can be but little doubt now, that while Mr. 
Skinner was plying Mr. Bensington’s chicks with 
Herakleophorbia IV., a number of wasps were just 
as industriously — perhaps more industriously — car- 
rying quantities of the same paste to their early sum- 
mer broods in the sand banks beyond the adjacent 
pine woods. And there can be no dispute whatever 
that these early broods found just as much growth 
and benefit in the substance as Mr. Bensington’s hens. 
It is in the nature of the wasp to attain to effective 
maturity before the domestic fowl — and in fact of all 
the creatures that were — through the generous care- 
lessness of the Skinners — partaking of the benefits 
Mr. Bensington heaped upon his hens, the wasps 
were the first to make any sort of figure in the 
world. 

It was a keeper named Godfrey on the estate of 
Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Hick, near Maidstone, 
who encountered and had the luck to kill the first of 
these monsters of whom history has any record. He 
was walking knee-high in bracken across an open 
space in the beechwoods that diversify Lieutenant- 
Colonel Hick’s park, and he was carrying his gun, 
very fortunately for him a double-barrelled gun — 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


37 


over his shoulder, when he first caught sight of the 
thing. It was, he says, coming down against the 
light, so that he could not see it very distinctly, and 
as it came it made a drone “like a motor car.” He 
admits he was frightened. It was evidently as big or 
bigger than a barn owl, and, to his practised eye, its 
flight and particularly the misty whirl of its wings 
must have seemed weirdly unbirdlike. The instinct 
of self-defence, I fancy, mingled with long habit, 
when, as he says, he “let fly, right away.” 

The queerness of the experience probably affected 
his aim; at any rate most of his shot missed, and the 
thing merely dropped for a moment with an angry 
“Wuzzzz” that revealed the wasp at once, and then 
rose again, with all its stripes shining against the 
light. He says it turned on him. At any rate, he 
fired his second barrel at less than twenty yards and 
threw down his gun, ran a pace or so, and ducked to 
avoid it. 

It flew, he is convinced, within a yard of him, 
struck the ground, rose again, came down again per- 
haps thirty yards away, and rolled over with its body 
wriggling and its sting stabbing out and back in its 
last agony. He emptied both barrels into it again 
before he ventured to go near. 

When he came to measure the thing, he found it 
was twenty-seven and a half inches across its open 
wings, and its sting was three inches long. The ab- 
domen was blown clean off from its body, but he esti- 
mated the length of the creature from head to sting 


3 8 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

as eighteen inches — which is very nearly correct. Its 
compound eyes were the si££L Qf pen ny pieces. 

That is the first authenticated appearance of these 
giant wasps. The day after, a cyclist riding, feet up, 
down the hill between Sevenoaks and Tonbridge, 
very narrowly missed running over a second of these 
giants that was crawling across the roadway. His 
passage seemed to alarm it, and it rose with a noise 
like a sawmill. His bicycle jumped the footpath in 
the emotion of the moment, and when he could look 
back the wasp was soaring away above the woods to- 
wards Westerham. 

After riding unsteadily for a little time, he put on 
his brake, dismounted — he was trembling so vio- 
lently that he fell over his machine in doing so — and 
sat down by the roadside to recover. He had in- 
tended to ride to Ashford, but he did not get beyond 
Tonbridge that day. 

After that, curiously enough, there is no record of 
any big wasps being seen for three days. I find on 
consulting the meteorological record of those days 
that they were overcast and chilly with local showers, 
which may perhaps account for this intermission. 
Then on the fourth day came blue sky and brilliant 
sunshine and such an outburst of wasps as the world 
had surely never seen before. 

How many big wasps came out that day it is im- 
possible to guess. There are at least fifty accounts 
of their apparition. There was one victim, a grocer, 
who discovered one of these monsters in a sugar- 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 39 

cask, and very rashly attacked it with a spade as it 
rose. He struck it to the ground for a moment, and 
it stung him through the boot as he struck at it again 
and cut its body in half. He was first dead of the 
two. . . . 

The most dramatic of the fifty appearances was 
certainly that of the wasp that visited the British 
Museum about midday, dropping out of the blue 
serene upon one of the innumerable pigeons that feed 
in the courtyard of that building, and flying up to the 
cornice to devour its victim at leisure. After that it 
crawled for a time over the museum roof, entered 
the dome of the reading-room by a skylight, buzzed 
about inside it for some little time — there was a 
stampede among the readers — and at last found an- 
other window and vanished again with a sudden 
silence from human observation. 

Most of the other reports were of mere passings 
or descents. A picnic party was dispersed at Alding- 
ton Knoll and all its sweets and jam consumed, and a 
puppy was killed and torn to pieces near Whitstable 
under the very eyes of its mistress. . 

The streets that evening resounded with the cry, 
the newspaper placards gave themselves up exclu- 
sively in the biggest of letters to the “Gigantic 
Wasps in Kent.” Agitated editors and assistant edi- 
tors ran up and down tortuous staircases bawling 
things about “wasps.” And Professor Redwood, 
emerging from his college in Bond Street at five, 
flushed from a heated discussion with his committee 


40 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


about the price of bull calves, bought an evening 
paper, opened it, changed colour, forgot about bull 
calves and committee forthwith, and took a hansom 
headlong for Bensington’s flat. 

V 

The flat was occupied, it seemed to him — to the 
exclusion of all other sensible objects — by Mr. Skin- 
ner and his voice, if indeed you can call either him or 
it a sensible object! 

The voice was up very high slopping about among 
the notes of anguish. “Itth impothible for uth to 
thtop, Thir. We’ve thtopped on hoping thingth 
would get better and they’ve only got worth, Thir. 
It ithn’t on’y the waptheth, Thir — thereth big 
earwigth, Thir — big ath that, Thir. (He indicated 
all his hand, and about three inches of fat dirty 
wrist.) “They pretty near give Mithith Thkinner 
fitth, Thir. And the thtinging nettleth by the runth, 
Thir, they’re growing, Thir, and the canary creeper, 
Thir, what we thowed near the think, Thir — it put 
itth tendril through the window in the night, Thir, 
and very nearly caught Mithith Thkinner by the 
legth, Thir. Itth that food of yourth, Thir. Wher- 
ever we thplathed it about, Thir, a bit, it’th thet 
everything growing ranker, Thir, than I ever 
thought anything could grow. Itth impothible to 
thtop a month, Thir. Itth more than our liveth are 
worth, Thir. Even if the waptheth don’t thting uth, 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


4i 


we thall be thuffocated by the creeper, Thir. You 
can’t imagine, Thir — unleth you come down to thee, 
Thir ” 

He turned his superior eye to the cornice above 
Redwood’s head. “ ’Ow do we know the ratth 
’aven’t got it, Thir! That ’th what I think of 
motht, Thir. I ’aven’t theen any big ratth, Thir, but 
’ow do I know, Thir. We been frightened for dayth 
becauth of the earwigth we’ve theen — like lobthters 
they wath — two of ’em, Thir — and the frightful 
way the canary creeper wath growing, and directly 
I heard the waptheth — directly I ’eard ’em, Thir, I 
underthood. I didn’t wait for nothing exthept to 
thow on a button I’d lortht, and then I came on up. 
Even now, Thir, I’m arf wild with angthiety, Thir. 
’Ow do I know watth happenin’ to Mithith Thkinner, 
Thir! Thereth the creeper growing all over the 
plathe like a thnake, Thir — thwelp me but you ’ave 
to watch it, Thir, and jump out of itth way! — and 
the earwigth gettin’ bigger and bigger, and the 
waptheth — . She ’athen’t even got a Blue Bag, 
Thir — if anything thould happen, Thir!” 

“But the hens,” said Mr. Bensington; “how are 
the hens?” 

“We fed ’em up to yethterday, thwelp me,” said 
Mr. Skinner. “But thith morning we didn’t dare , 
Thir. The noithe of the waptheth wath — thomething 
awful, Thir. They wath coming out- — dothenth. 
Ath big ath ’enth. I thayth to ’er, I thayth you juth 
thow me on a button or two, I thayth, for I can’t go 


42 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


to London like thith, I thayth, and I’ll go up to 
Mither Benthington, I thayth, and ekthplain 
thingth to ’im. And you thtop in thith room till I 
come back to you, I thayth, and keep the windowth 
thhut jutht ath tight ath ever you can, I thayth.” 

“If you hadn’t been so confoundedly untidy — ” 
began Redwood. 

“Oh! don’t thay that, Thir,” said Skinner. “Not 
now, Thir. Not with me tho diththrethed, Thir, 
about Mithith Thkinner, Thir! Oh, don’t, Thir! 
I ’aven’t the ’eart to argue with you. Thwelp me, 
Thir, I ’aven’t! Itth the ratth I keep a thinking of 
— ’Ow do I know they ’aven’t got at Mithith Thkin- 
ner while I been up ’ere?” 

“And you haven’t got a solitary measurement of 
all these beautiful growth curves !” said Redwood. 

“I been too upthet, Thir,” said Mr. Skinner. “If 
you knew what we been through — me and the mith- 
ith ! All thith latht month. We ’aven’t known what 
to make of it, Thir. What with the henth gettin’ tho 
rank, and the earwigth, and the canary creeper. I 
dunno if I told you, Thir — the canary creeper . . .” 

“You’ve told us all that,” said Redwood. “The 
thing is, Bensington, what are we to do?” 

“What are we to do?” said Mr. Skinner. 

“You’ll have to go back to Mrs. Skinner,” said 
Redwood. “You can’t leave her there alone all 
night.” 

“Not alone, Thir, I don’t. Not if there wath a 
dothen Mithith Thkinnerth. Itth Mithter Benthing- 
ton ” 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 43 

“Nonsense,” said Redwood. “The wasps will be 
all right at night. And the earwigs will get out of 
your way ” 

“But about the ratth?” 

“There aren’t any rats,” said Redwood. 

VI 

Mr. Skinner might have foregone his chief anxiety. 
Mrs. Skinner did not stop out her day. 

About eleven the canary creeper, which had been 
quietly active all the morning, began to clamber over 
the window and darken it very greatly, and the 
darker it got the more and more clearly Mrs. Skin- 
ner perceived that her position would speedily be- 
come untenable. And also that she had lived many 
ages since Skinner went. She peered out of the dark- 
ling window, through the stirring tendrils, for some 
time, and then went very cautiously and opened the 
bedroom door and listened. 

Everything seemed quiet, and so, tucking her 
skirts high about her, Mrs. Skinner made a bolt for 
the bedroom, and having first looked under the bed 
and locked herself in, proceeded with the methodical 
rapidity of an experienced woman to pack for depart- 
ure. The bed had not been made, and the room was 
littered with pieces of the creeper that Skinner had 
hacked off in order to close the window overnight, 
but these disorders she did not heed. She packed in 
a decent sheet. She packed all her own wardrobe 
and a velveteen jacket that Skinner wore in his finer 


44 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


moments, and she packed a jar of pickles that had 
not been opened, and so far she was justified in her 
packing. But she also packed two of the hermeti- 
cally closed tins containing Herakleophorbia IV. 
that Mr. Bensington had brought on his last visit. 
(She was honest, good woman — but she was a grand- 
mother, and her heart had burned within her to see 
such good growth lavished on a lot of dratted 
chicks.) 

And having packed all these things, she put on her 
bonnet, took off her apron, tied a new bootlace 
round her umbrella, and after listening for a long time 
at door and window, opened the door and sallied out 
into a perilous world. The umbrella was under her 
arm and she clutched the bundle with two gnarled 
and resolute hands. It was her best Sunday bonnet, 
and the two poppies that reared their heads amidst 
its splendours of band and bead seemed instinct with 
the same tremulous courage that possessed her. 

The features about the roots of her nose wrinkled 
with determination. She had had enough of it ! All 
alone there! Skinner might come back there if he 
liked. 

She went out by the front door, going that way 
not because she wanted to go to Hickleybrow (her 
goal was Cheasing Eyebright, where her married 
daughter resided), but because the back door was 
impassable on account of the canary creeper that had 
been growing so furiously ever since she upset the 
can of food near its roots. She listened for a space 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


45 

and closed the front door very carefully behind her. 
At the corner of the house she paused and recon- 
noitered. 

An extensive sandy scar upon the hillside beyond 
the pine woods marked the nest of the giant Wasps, 
and this she studied very earnestly. The coming and 
going of the morning was over, not a wasp chanced 
to be in sight then, and except for a sound scarcely 
more perceptible than a steam wood-saw at work 
amidst the pines would have been, everything was 
still. As for earwigs, she could see not one. Down 
among the cabbage indeed something was stirring, 
but it might just as probably be a cat stalking birds. 
She watched this for a time. 

She went a few paces past the corner, came in sight 
of the run containing the giant chicks and stopped 
again. “Ah!” she said, and shook her head slowly 
at the sight of them. They were at that time about 
the height of emus, but of course much thicker in the 
body — a larger thing altogether. They were all 
hens and five all told, now that the two cockerels had 
killed each other. She hesitated at their drooping 
attitudes. “Poor dears!” she said, and put down her 
bundle; “they’ve got no water. And they’ve ’ad no 
food these twenty-four hours! And such appetites, 
too, as they ’ave!” She put a lean finger to her lips 
and communed with herself. 

Then this dirty old woman did what seems to me 
a quite heroic deed of mercy. She left her bundle 
and umbrella in the middle of the brick path, and 


46 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

went to the well and drew no fewer than three pail- 
fuls of water for the chickens’ empty trough, and 
then while they were all crowding about that, she un- 
did the door of the run very softly, after which she 
became extremely active, resumed her package, got 
over the hedge at the bottom of the garden, crossed 
the rank meadows (in order to avoid the wasps’ nest) 
and toiled up the winding path towards Cheasing 
Eyebright. 

She panted up the hill, and as she went she paused 
ever and again, to rest her bundle and get her breath 
and stare back at the little cottage beside the pine- 
wood below. And when at last, when she was near 
the crest of the hill, she saw afar off three several 
wasps dropping heavily westward, it helped her 
greatly on her way. 

She soon got out of the open and in the high 
banked lane beyond (which seemed a safer place to 
her) and so up by Hickleybrow Coombe to the 
downs. There at the foot of the downs where a big 
tree gave an air of shelter she rested for a space on a 
stile. 

Then on again very resolutely. 

You figure her, I hope with her white bundle, a 
sort of erect black ant, hurrying along the little white 
path-thread athwart the downland slopes under the 
hot sun of the summer afternoon. On she struggled 
after her resolute indefatigable nose, and the poppies 
in her bonnet quivered perpetually and her spring 
side boots grew whiter and whiter with the downland 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 47 

dust. Flip, flap, flip, flap went her footfalls through 
the still heat of the day, and persistently, incurably, 
her umbrella sought to slip from under the elbow 
that retained it. The mouth wrinkle under her nose 
was pursed to an extreme resolution and ever and 
again she told her umbrella to come up or gave her 
tightly clutched bundle a vindictive jerk. And at 
times her lips mumbled with fragments of some fore- 
seen argument between herself and Skinner. 

And far away, miles and miles away, a steeple and 
a hanger grew insensibly out of the vague blue to 
mark more and more distinctly the quiet corner 
where Cheasing Eyebright sheltered from the tumult 
of the world, recking little or nothing of the Hera- 
kleophorbia concealed in that white bundle that 
struggled so persistently towards its orderly retire- 
ment. 

VII 

So far as I can gather, the pullets came into Hick- 
leybrow about three o’clock in the afternoon. Their 
coming must have been a brisk affair, though nobody 
was out in the street to see it. The violent bellowing 
of little Skelmersdale seems to have been the first 
announcement of anything out of the way. Miss 
Durgan of the Post Office was at the window as 
usual, and saw the hen that had caught the unhappy 
child, in violent flight up the street with its victim, 
closely pursued by two others. You know that swing- 
ing stride of the emancipated athletic latterday pullet ! 


48 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

You know the keen insistence of the hungry hen! 
There was Plymouth Rock in these birds, I am told, 
and even without Herakleophorbia that is a gaunt 
and striding strain. 

Probably Miss Durgan was not altogether taken 
by surprise. In spite of Mr. Bensington’s insistence 
upon secrecy, rumours of the great chicken Mr. Skin- 
ner was producing had been about the village for 
some weeks. “Lor!” she cried, “it’s what I ex- 
pected.” 

She seems to have behaved with great presence of 
mind. She snatched up the sealed bag of letters that 
was waiting to go on to Urshot, and rushed out of 
the door at once. Almost simultaneously Mr. Skel- 
mersdale himself appeared down the village, grip- 
ping a watering-pot by the spout and very white in 
the face. And, of course, in a moment or so every 
one in the village was rushing to the door or window. 

The spectacle of Miss Durgan all across the road, 
with the entire day’s correspondence of Hickleybrow 
in her hand, gave pause to the pullet in possession 
of Master Skelmersdale. She halted through one in- 
stant’s indecision and then turned for the open gates 
of Fulcher’s yard. That instant was fatal. The 
second pullet ran in neatly, got possession of the 
child by a well-directed peck, and went over the wall 
into the vicarage garden. 

“Charawk, chawk, chawk, chawk, chawk, chawk!” 
shrieked the hindmost hen, hit smartly by the 
watering-can Mr. Skelmersdale had thrown, and flut- 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


49 


tered wildly over Mrs. Glue’s cottage and so into the 
doctor’s field, while the rest of those G argan tuan 
birds pursued the pullet in possession of the chilcT 
across the vicarage lawn. 

“Good heavens !” cried the curate, or (as some say) 
something much more manly, and ran, whirling his 
croquet mallet and shouting, to head off the chase. 

“Stop, you wretch!” cried the curate, as though 
giant hens were the commonest facts in life. 

And then, finding he could not possibly intercept 
her, he hurled his mallet with all his might and main, 
and out it shot in a gracious curve within a foot or 
so of Master Skelmersdale’s head and through the 
glass lantern of the conservatory. Smash ! The new 
conservatory ! The vicar’s wife’s beautiful new con- 
servatory ! 

It frightened the hen. It might have frightened 
any one. She dropped her victim into a Portugal 
laurel (from which he was presently extracted, dis- 
ordered but, save for his less delicate garments, un- 
injured), made a flapping leap for the roof of Ful- 
cher’s stables, put her foot through a weak place in 
the tiles, and descended, so to speak, out of the in- 
finite into the contemplative quiet of Mr. Bumps the 
paralytic — who, it is now proved beyond all cavil, 
did, on this one occasion in his life, get down the en- 
tire length of his garden and indoors without any as- 
sistance whatever, bolt the door after him, and im- 
mediately relapse again into Christian resignation 
and helpless dependence upon his wife. . . . 


50 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

The rest of the pullets were headed off by the 
other croquet players, and went through the vicar’s 
kitchen garden into the doctor’s field, to which ren- 
dezvous the fifth also came at last, clucking discon- 
solately after an unsuccessful attempt to walk on the 
cucumber frames in Mr. Witherspoon’s place. 

They seem to have stood about in a hen-like man- 
ner for a time, and scratched a little and chirrawked 
meditatively, and then one pecked at and pecked over 
a hive of the doctor’s bees, and after that they set 
off in a gawky, jerky, feathery, fitful sort of way 
across the fields towards Urshot, and Hickleybrow 
Street saw them no more. Near Urshot they really 
came upon commensurate food in a field of swedes, 
and pecked for a space with gusto, until their fame 
overtook them. 

The chief immediate reaction of this astonishing 
irruption of gigantic poultry upon the human mind 
was to arouse an extraordinary passion to whoop and 
run and throw things, and in quite a little time almost 
all the available manhood of Hickleybrow, and sev- 
eral ladies, were out with a remarkable assortment of 
flappish and whangable articles in hand — to com- 
mence the scooting of the giant hens. They drove 
them into Urshot, where there was a Rural Fete, and 
Urshot took them as the crowning glory of a happy 
day. They began to be shot at near Findon Beeches, 
but at first only with a rook rifle. Of course birds 
of that size could absorb an unlimited quantity of 
small shot without inconvenience. They scattered 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 51 

somewhere near Sevenoaks, and near Tonbridge one 
of them fled clucking for a time in excessive agitation, 
somewhat ahead of and parallel with the afternoon 
boat express — to the great astonishment of every one 
therein. 

And about half-past five two of them were caught 
very cleverly by a circus proprietor at Tunbridge 
Wells, who lured them into a cage, rendered vacant 
through the death of a widowed dromedary, by scat- 
tering cakes and bread. 


VIII 

When the unfortunate Skinner got out of the 
South-Eastern train at Urshot that evening it was 
already nearly dusk. The train was late, but not in- 
ordinately late — and Mr. Skinner remarked as much 
to the station-master. Perhaps he saw a certain preg- 
nancy in the station-master’s eye. After the briefest 
hesitation and with a confidential movement of his 
hand to the side of his mouth he asked if “anything” 
had happened that day. 

“How d’yer mean?” said the station-master, a man 
with a hard emphatic voice. 

“Thethe ’ere waptheth and thingth.” 

“We ’aven’t ’ad much time to think of waptheth” 
said the station-master agreeably. We’ve been too 
busy with your brasted ’ens,” and he broke the news 
of the pullets to Mr. Skinner as one might break the 
window of an adverse politician. 


5 * 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“You ain’t ’eard anything of Mithith Thkinner?” 
asked Skinner, amidst that missile shower of pithy 
information and comment. 

“No fear!” said the station-master — as though 
even he drew the line somewhere in the matter of 
knowledge. 

“I mutht make inquireth ’bout thith,” said Mr. 
Skinner, edging out of reach of the station-master’s 
concluding generalisations about the responsibility at- 
taching to the excessive nurture of hens. 

Going through Urshot Mr. Skinner was hailed by 
a lime-burner from the pits over by Hankey and 
asked if he was looking for his hens. 

“You ain’t ’eard anything of Mithith Thkinner?” 
he asked. 

The lime-burner — his exact phrases need not con- 
cern us — expressed his superior interest in hens. . . . 

It was already dark — as dark at least as a clear 
night in the English June can be — when Skinner — or 
his head at any rate — came into the bar of the Jolly 
Drovers and said: “Elio! You ’aven’t ’eard any- 
thing of thith ’ere thtory ’bout my ’enth, ’ave you?” 

“Oh, ’aven’t we!” said Mr. Fulcher. “Why, part 
of the story’s been and bust into my stable roof and 
one chapter smashed a ’ole in Missis Vicar’s green 
’ouse — I beg ’er pardon — Conservamztory.” 

Skinner came in. “I’d like thomething a little 
comforting,” he said, “ ’ot gin and water’th about 
my figure,” and everybody began to tell him things 
about the pullets. 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


S3 


“ Grathuth me!” said Skinner. 

“You ’aven’t ’eard anything about Mithith Thkin- 
ner, ’ave you?” he asked in a pause. 

“That we ’aven’t!” said Mr. Witherspoon. “We 
‘aven’t thought of ’er. We ain’t thought nothing of 
either of you.” 

“Ain’t you been ’ome to-day?” asked Fulcher over 
a tankard. 

“If one of those brasted birds ’ave pecked ’er,” 
began Mr. Witherspoon, and left the full horror to 
their unaided imaginations. 

It appeared to the meeting at the time that it 
would be an interesting end to an eventful day to go 
on with Skinner and see if anything had happened to 
Mrs. Skinner. One never knows what luck one may 
have when accidents are at large. But Skinner, stand- 
ing at the bar and drinking his hot gin and water, 
with one eye roving over the things at the back of 
the bar and the other fixed on the Absolute, missed 
the psychological moment. 

“I thuppothe there ’athen’t been any trouble with 
any of thethe big waptheth to-day anywhere?” he 
asked, with an elaborate detachment of manner. 

“Been too busy with your ’ens,” said Fulcher. 

“I thuppothe they’ve all gone in now anyhow,” 
said Skinner. 

“What— the ’ens?” 

“I wath thinking of the waptheth more particu- 
larly,” said Skinner. 

And then with an air of circumspection that would 


54 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


have awakened suspicion in a week-old baby, and lay- 
ing the accent heavily on most of the words he chose, 
he asked, “I thuppothe nobody ’athen’t ’eard of any 
other big thingth about, ’ave they? Big dogth or 
catth or anything of that thort? Theemth to me if 
thereth big henth and big waptheth cornin’ on ” 

He laughed with a fine pretence of talking idly. 

But a brooding expression came upon the faces of 
the Hickleybrow men. Fulcher was the first to give 
their condensing thought the concrete shape of words. 

“A cat to match them ’ens — ” said Fulcher. 

“Aye!” said Witherspoon, “a cat to match they 
’ens.” 

“ ’Twould be a tiger,” said Fulcher. 

“More’n a tiger,” said Witherspoon. 

When at last Skinner followed the lonely footpath 
over the swelling field that separated Hickleybrow 
from the sombre pine-shaded hollow in whose black 
shadows the gigantic canary creeper grappled 
silently with the Experimental Farm, he followed it 
alone. 

He was distinctly seen to rise against the skyline, 
against the warm clear immensity of the northern 
sky — for so far public interest followed him — and to 
descend again into the night, into an obscurity from 
which it would seem he will nevermore emerge. He 
passed — into a mystery. No one knows to this day 
what happened to him after he crossed the brow. 
When later on the two Fulchers and Witherspoon, 
moved by their own imaginations, came up the hill 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


55 

and stared after him, the night had swallowed him 
up altogether. 

The three men stood close. There was not a sound 
out of the wooded blackness that hid the Farm from 
their eyes. 

“It’s all right/’ said young Fulcher ending a 
silence. 

“Don’t see any lights,” said Witherspoon. 

“You wouldn’t from here.” 

“It’s misty,” said the elder Fulcher. 

They meditated for a space. 

“ ’E’d ’ave come back if anything was wrong,” 
said young Fulcher, and this seemed so obvious and 
conclusive that presently old Fulcher said “Well,” 
and the three went home to bed — thoughtfully I will 
admit. 

A shepherd out by Huckster’s Farm heard a 
squealing in the night that he thought was foxes, and 
in the morning one of his lambs had been killed, 
dragged halfway towards Hickleybrow and partially 
devoured. . . . 

The inexplicable part of it all is the absence of 
any indisputable remains of Skinner ! 

Many weeks after, amidst the charred ruins of 
the Experimental Farm, there was found something 
which may or may not have been a human shoulder- 
blade, and in another part of the ruins a long bone 
greatly gnawed and equally doubtful. Near the stile 
going up towards Eyebright there was found a glass 
eye, and many people discovered thereupon that Skin- 


56 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

ner owed much of his personal charm to such a pos- 
session. It stared out upon the world with that same 
inevitable effect of detachment, that same severe 
melancholy that had been the redemption of his else 
worldly countenance. 

And about the ruins industrious research discov- 
ered the metal rings and charred coverings of two 
linen buttons, three shanked buttons entire, and one 
of that metallic sort which is used in the less conspic- 
uous sutures of the human (Economy. These re- 
mains have been accepted by persons in authority as 
conclusive of a destroyed and scattered Skinner, but 
for my own entire conviction, and in view of his dis- 
tinctive idiosyncrasy, I must confess I should prefer 
fewer buttons and more bones. 

The glass eye of course has an air of extreme con- 
viction, but if it really is Skinner’s — and even Mrs. 
Skinner did not certainly know if that immobile eye 
of his was glass — something has changed it from a 
liquid brown to a serene and confident blue. That 
shoulder-blade is an extremely doubtful document, 
and I would like to put it side by side with the 
gnawed scapulae of a few of the commoner domestic 
animals beforeae I admitted its humanity. 

And where were Skinner’s boots, for example? 
Perverted and strange as a rat’s appetite must be, is 
it conceivable that the same creatures that could leave 
a lamb only half eaten, would finish up Skinner, hair, 
bones, teeth, and boots? 

I have closely questioned as many as I could of 


ch. ii THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM 


57 

those who knew Skinner at all intimately, and they 
one and all agree that they cannot imagine anything 
eating him. He was the sort of man, as a retired 
seafaring person living in one of Mr. W. W. Jacobs’ 
cottages at Dunton Green told me, with a guarded 
significance of manner not uncommon in those parts, 
who would “get washed up anyhow,” and as regards 
the devouring element was “fit to put a fire out.” He 
considered that Skinner would be as safe on a raft 
as anywhere. The retired seafaring man added, that 
he wished to say nothing whatever against Skinner; 
facts were facts. And rather than have his clothes 
made by Skinner, the retired seafaring man remarked 
he would take his chance of being locked up. These 
observations certainly do not present Skinner in the 
light of an appetising object. 

To be perfectly frank with the reader, I do not 
believe he ever went back to the Experimental Farm. 
I believe he hovered through long hesitations about 
the fields of the Hickleybrow glebe, and finally, when 
that squealing began, took the line of least resistance 
out of his perplexities into the Incognito. 

And in the Incognito, whether of this or of some 
other world unknown to us, he obstinately and quite 
indisputably has remained to this day. . . . 


CHAPTER THE THIRD 


THE GIANT RATS 

I 

It was two nights after the disappearance of Mr. 
Skinner that the Podbourne doctor was out late near 
Hankey, driving in his buggy. He had been up all 
night assisting another undistinguished citizen into 
this curious world of ours, and his task accomplished, 
he was driving homeward in a drowsy mood enough. 
It was about two o’clock in the morning, and the 
waning moon was rising. The summer night had 
gone cold, and there was a low-lying whitish mist 
that made things indistinct. He was quite alone — for 
his coachman was ill in bed — and there was nothing 
to be seen on either hand but a drifting mystery of 
hedge running athwart the yellow glare of his lamps, 
and nothing to hear but the clitter, clatter of his 
horse and the gride and hedge echo of his wheels. 
His horse was as trustworthy as himself, and one does 
not wonder that he dozed. . . . 

You know that intermittent drowsing as one sits, 
the drooping of the head, the nodding to the rhythm 
of the wheels, then chin upon the breast, and at once 
the sudden start up again. 

Pit ter, litter, patter . 


58 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


59 


“What was that?” 

It seemed to the doctor he had heard a thin shrill 
squeal close at hand. For a moment he was quite 
awake. He said a word or two of undeserved rebuke 
to his horse, and looked about him. He tried to per- 
suade himself that he had heard the distant squeal 
of a fox — or perhaps a young rabbit gripped by a 
ferret. 

Swish , swish , swish, pitter, patter, swish . . . 

“What was that?” 

He felt he was getting fanciful. He shook his 
shoulders and told his horse to get on. He listened 
and heard nothing. 

“Or was it nothing?” 

He had the queerest impression that something 
had just peeped over the hedge at him, a queer big 
head. With round ears! He peered hard, but he 
could see nothing. 

“Nonsense,” said he. 

He sat up with an idea that he had dropped into a 
nightmare, gave his horse the slightest touch of the 
whip, spoke to it and peered again over the hedge. 
The glare of his lamp, however, together with the 
mist, rendered things indistinct, and he could dis- 
tinguish nothing. It came into his head, he says, 
that there could be nothing there, because if there 
was his horse would have shied at it. Yet for all 
that his senses remained nervously awake. 

Then he heard quite distinctly a soft pattering of 
feet in pursuit along the road. 


6 o 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


He would not believe his ears about that. He 
could not look round, for the road had a sinuous 
curve just there. He whipped up his horse and 
glanced sideways again. And then he saw quite dis- 
tinctly where a ray from his lamp leapt a low stretch 
of hedge, the curved back of — some big animal, he 
couldn’t tell what, going along in quick convulsive 
leaps. 

He says he thought of the old tales of witchcraft 
— the thing was so utterly unlike any animal he knew, 
and he tightened his hold on the reins for fear of the 
fear of his horse. Educated man as he was, he ad- 
mits he asked himself if this could be something that 
his horse could not see. 

Ahead, and drawing near in silhouette against the 
rising moon, was the outline of the little hamlet of 
Hankey, comforting, though it showed never a light, 
and he cracked his whip and spoke again and then in 
a flash the rats were at him ! 

He had passed a gate, and as he did so, the fore- 
most rat came leaping over into the road. The thing 
sprang upon him out of vagueness into the ut- 
most clearness, the sharp, eager, round-eared face, 
the long body exaggerated by its movement; and 
what particularly struck him, the pink webbed fore- 
feet of the beast. What must have made it more 
horrible to him at the time, was that he had no idea 
the thing was any created beast he knew. He did 
not recognise it as a rat, because of the size. His 
horse gave a bound as the thing dropped into the 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


6 1 


road beside it. The little lane woke into tumult at 
the report of the whip and the doctor’s shout. The 
whole thing suddenly went fast. 

Rattle-clatter, clash, clatter. 

The doctor, one gathers, stood up, shouted to his 
horse, and slashed with all his strength. The rat 
winced and swerved most reassuringly at his blow 
— in the glare of his lamp he could see the fur furrow 
under the lash — and he slashed again and again, 
heedless and unaware of the second pursuer that 
gained upon his offside. 

He let the reins go, and glanced back to discover 
the third rat in pursuit behind. . . . 

His horse bounded forward. The buggy leapt 
high at a rut. For a frantic minute perhaps every- 
thing seemed to be going in leaps and bounds. . . . 

It was sheer good luck the horse came down in 
Hankey, and not either before or after the houses 
had been passed. 

No one knows how the horse came down, whether 
it stumbled or whether the rat on the offside really 
got home with one of those slashing down strokes of 
the teeth (given with the full weight of the body) ; 
and the doctor never discovered that he himself was 
bitten until he was inside the brickmaker’s house, 
much less did he discover when the bite occurred, 
though bitten he was and badly — a long slash like the 
slash of a double tomahawk that had cut two parallel 
ribbons of flesh from his left shoulder. 

He was standing up in his buggy at one moment, 


62 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


and in the next he had leapt to the ground, with his 
ankle, though he did not know it, badly sprained, and 
he was cutting furiously at a third rat that was flying 
directly at him. He scarcely remembers the leap he 
must have made over the top of the wheel as the 
buggy came over, so obliteratingly hot and swift did 
his impressions rush upon him. I think myself the 
horse reared up with the rat biting again at its throat, 
and fell sideways, and carried the whole affair over; 
and that the doctor sprang, as it were, instinctively. 
As the buggy came down, the receiver of the lamp 
smashed, and suddenly poured a flare of blazing oil, 
a thud of white flame into the struggle. 

That was the first thing the brickmaker saw. 

He had heard the clatter of the doctor’s approach 
and — though the doctor’s memory has nothing of 
this — wild shouting. He had got out of bed hastily, 
and as he did so came the terrific smash, and up shot 
the glare outside the rising blind. “It was brighter 
than day,” he says. He stood, blind cord in hand, 
and stared out of the window at a nightmare trans- 
formation of the familiar road before him. The 
black figure of the doctor with its whirling whip 
danced out against the flame. The horse kicked in- 
distinctly, half hidden by the blaze, with a rat at its 
throat. In the obscurity against the churchyard wall, 
the eyes of a second monster shone wickedly. An- 
other — a mere dreadful blackness with red-lit eyes 
and flesh-coloured hands — clutched unsteadily on the 
wall coping to which it had leapt at the flash of the 
exploding lamp. 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


63 


You know the keen face of a rat, those two sharp 
teeth, those pitiless eyes. Seen magnified to near six 
times its linear dimensions, and still more magnified 
by darkness and amazement and the leaping fancies 
of a fitful blaze, it must have been an ill sight for the 
brickmaker — still more than half asleep. 

Then the doctor had grasped the opportunity, that 
momentary respite the flare afforded, and was out of 
the brickmaker’s sight below battering the door with 
the butt of his whip. 

The brickmaker would not let him in until he had 
got a light. 

There are those who have blamed the man for 
that, but until I know my own courage better, I hesi- 
tate to join their number. 

The doctor yelled and hammered. . . 

The brickmaker says he was weeping with terror 
when at last the door was opened. 

“Bolt,” said the doctor, “bolt” — he could not say 
“bolt the door.” He tried to help and was of no 
service. The brickmaker fastened the door and the 
doctor had to sit on the chair beside the clock for a 
space before he could go upstairs. . . 

“I don’t know what they are!” he repeated several 
times. “I don’t know what they are ” — with a high 
note on the “are.” 

The brickmaker would have got him whisky, but 
the doctor would not be left alone with nothing but 
a flickering light just then. 

It was long before the brickmaker could get him 
to go upstairs. . . . 


64 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

And when the fire was out the giant rats came 
back, took the dead horse, dragged it across the 
churchyard into the brickfield and ate at it until it 
was dawn, none even then daring to disturb them. . . . 

II 

Redwood went round to Bensington about eleven 
the next morning with the “second editions” of three 
evening papers in his hand. 

Bensington looked up from a despondent medita- 
tion over the forgotten pages of the most distracting 
novel the Brompton Road librarian had been able to 
find him. “Anything fresh?” he asked. 

“Two men stung near Chartham.” 

“They ought to let us smoke out that nest. They 
really did. It’s their own fault.” 

“It’s their own fault, certainly,” said Redwood. 

“Have you heard anything — about buying the 
farm?” 

“The House Agent,” said Redwood, “is a thing 
with a big mouth and made of dense wood. It pre- 
tends some one else is after the house — it always 
does, you know — and won’t understand there’s a 
hurry. “This is a matter of life and death,” I said, 
“don’t you understand?” It drooped its eyes half 
shut and said, “Then why don’t you go the other 
two hundred pounds?” I’d rather live in a world c fi 
solid wasps than give in to the stonewalling stupidity 
of that offensive creature. I ” 


ch. in THE GIANT RATS 65 

He paused, feeling that a sentence like that might 
very easily be spoiled by its context. 

“It’s too much to hope,” said Bensington, that one 
of the wasps ” 

“The wasp has no more idea of public utility than 
a — than a House Agent,” said Redwood. 

He talked for a little while about house agents 
and solicitors and people of that sort, in the unjust, 
unreasonable way that so many people do somehow 
get to talk of these business calculi (“Of all the 
cranky things in this cranky world, it is the most 
cranky to my mind of all, that while we expect hon- 
our, courage, efficiency, from a doctor or a soldier 
as a matter of course, a solicitor or a house agent is 
not only permitted but expected to display nothing 
but a sort of greedy, greasy, obstructive, over-reach- 
ing imbecility — ” etc.) — and then, greatly relieved, 
he went to the window and stared out at the Sloane 
Street traffic. 

Bensington had put the most exciting novel con- 
ceivable on the little table that carried his electric 
standard. He joined the fingers of his opposed hands 
very carefully and regarded them. “Redwood,” he 
said. “Do they say much about Us?” 

“Not so much as I should expect.” 

“They don’t denounce us at all?” 

“Not a bit. But, on the other hand, they don’t 
back up what I point out must be done. I’ve written 
to the Times, you know, explaining the whole 
thing ” 


66 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“We take the Daily Chronicle” said Bensington. 

“And the Times has a long leader on the subject 
— a very high-class, well-written leader — with three 
pieces of Times Latin — status quo is one — and it 
reads like the voice of Somebody Impersonal of the 
Greatest Importance suffering from Influenza Head- 
ache and talking through sheets and sheets of felt 
without getting any relief from it whatever. Read- 
ing between the lines, you know, it’s pretty clear that 
the Times considers that it is useless to mince matters 
and that something (indefinite of course) has to be 
done at once. Otherwise still more undesirable con- 
sequences — Times } English, you know, for more 
wasps and stings. Thoroughly statesmanlike arti- 
cle!” 

“And meanwhile this Bigness is spreading in all 
sorts of ugly ways.” 

“Precisely.” 

“I wonder if Skinner was right about those big 
rats ” 

“Oh no! That would be too much,” said Red- 
wood. 

He came and stood by Bensington’s chair. 

“By the bye,” he said, with a slightly lowered 
voice, “how does she ?” 

He indicated the closed door. 

“Cousin Jane? She simply knows nothing about 
it. Doesn’t connect us with it and won’t read the 
articles. “Gigantic wasps!” she says, “I haven’t pa- 
tience to read the papers.” 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


67 


“That’s very fortunate,” said Redwood. 

“I suppose — Mrs. Redwood ?” 

“No,” said Redwood, “just at present it happens 
— she’s terribly worried about the child. You know, 
he keeps on.” 

“Growing?” 

“Yes. Put on forty-one ounces in ten days. 
Weighs nearly four stone. And only six months old ! 
Naturally rather alarming.” 

“Healthy?” 

“Vigorous. His nurse is leaving because he kicks 
so forcibly. And everything, of course, shockingly 
outgrown. Everything, you know, has had to be 
made fresh, clothes and everything. Perambulator 
— light affair — broke one wheel, and the youngster 
had to be brought home on the milkman’s hand-truck. 
Yes. Quite a crowd. . . . And we’ve put 

Georgina Phyllis back into his cot and put him into 
the bed of Georgina Phyllis. His mother — naturally 
alarmed. Proud at first and inclined to praise Win- 
kles. Not now. Feels the thing can’t be wholesome. 
You know.” 

“I imagined you were going to put him on dimin- 
ishing doses.” 

“I tried it.” 

“Didn’t it work?” 

“Howls. In the ordinary way the cry of a child is 
loud and distressing; it is for the good of the species 
that this should be so — but since he has been on the 
Herakleophorbia treatment ” 


68 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“Mm,” said Bensington, regarding his fingers with 
more resignation than he had hitherto displayed. 

“Practically the thing must come out. People will 
hear of this child, connect it up with our hens and 
things, and the whole thing will come round to my 
wife. . . . How she will take it I haven’t the 

remotest idea.” 

“It is difficult,” said Mr. Bensington, “to form any 
plan — certainly.” 

He removed his glasses and wiped them carefully. 

“It is another instance,” he generalised, “of the 
thing that is continually happening. We — if indeed 
I may presume to the adjective — scientific men — we 
work of course always for a theoretical result — a 
purely theoretical result. But, incidentally, we do 
set forces in operation — new forces. We mustn’t 
control them — and nobody else can. Practically, 
Redwood, the thing is out of our hands. We supply 
the material ” 

“And they,” said Redwood, turning to the win- 
dow, “get the experience.” 

“So far as this trouble down in Kent goes I am 
not disposed to worry further.” 

“Unless they worry us.” 

“Exactly. And if they like to muddle about with 
solicitors and pettifoggers and legal obstructions and 
weighty considerations of the tomfool order, until 
they have got a number of new gigantic species of 
vermin well established — . Things always have 
been in a muddle, Redwood.” 


ch. hi THE GIANT RATS 69 

Redwood traced a twisted, tangled line in the 
air. 

“And our real interest lies at present with your 
boy.” 

Redwood turned about and came and stared at his 
collaborator. 

“What do you think of him, Bensington? You 
can look at this business with a greater detachment 
than I can. What am I to do about him?” 

“Go on feeding him.” 

“On Herakleophorbia?” 

“On Herakleophorbia.” 

“And then he’ll grow.” 

“He’ll grow, as far as I can calculate from the 
hens and the wasps, to the height of about five and 
thirty feet — with everything in proportion ” 

“And then what’ll he do?” 

“That,” said Mr. Bensington, “is just what makes 
the whole thing so interesting.” 

“Confound it, man! Think of his clothes. 

“And when he’s grown up,” said Redwood, he’ll 
only be one solitary Gulliver in a pigmy world.” 

Mr. Bensignton’s eye over his gold rim was preg- 
nant. 

“Why solitary?” he said, and repeated still more 
darkly, “Why solitary?” 

“But you don’t propose ?” 

“I said,” said Mr. Bensington, with the self-com- 
placency of a man who has produced a good signifi- 
cant saying, “Why solitary?” 


yo THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

“Meaning that one might bring up other chil- 
dren ?” 

“Meaning nothing beyond my inquiry.” 

Redwood began to walk about the room. “Of 
course,” he said, “one might — But still! What 
are we coming to?” 

Bensington evidently enjoyed his line of high in- 
tellectual detachment. “The thing that interests me 
most, Redwood, of all this, is to think that his brain 
at the top of him will also, so far as my reasoning 
goes, be five and thirty feet or so above our level. 

. . . What’s the matter?” 

Redwood stood at the window and stared at a 
news placard on a paper-cart that rattled up the 
street. 

“What’s the matter?” repeated Bensington, ris- 
ing. 

Redwood exclaimed violently. 

“What is it?” said Bensington. 

“Get a paper,” said Redwood, moving doorward. 

“Why?” 

“Get a paper. Something — I didn’t quite catch 
— Gigantic rats !” 

“Rats?” 

“Yes, rats. Skinner was right after all!” 

“What do you mean?” 

“How the Deuce am I to know till I see a paper? 
Great Rats! Good Lord! I wonder if he’s eaten!” 
He glanced for his hat, and decided to go hat- 
less. 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


7 1 


As he rushed downstairs two steps at a time, he 
could hear along the street the mighty howlings, to 
and fro, of the Hooligan paper-sellers making a 
Boom. 

“ ’Orrible affair in Kent — ’orrible affair in Kent. 
Doctor . . . eaten by rats. ’Orrible affair — 

’orrible affair — rats — eaten by Stchewpendous rats. 
Full perticulars — ’orrible affair.” 

Ill 

Cossar, the well-known civil engineer, found them 
in the great doorway of the flat mansions, Redwood 
holding out the damp pink paper and Bensington on 
tiptoe, reading over his arm. Cossar was a large- 
bodied man with gaunt inelegant limbs casually 
placed at convenient corners of his body, and a face 
like a carving abandoned at an early stage as alto- 
gether too unpromising for completion. His nose 
had been left square, and his lower jaw projected 
beyond his upper. He breathed audibly. Few peo- 
ple considered him handsome. His hair was entirely 
tangential, and his voice, which he used sparingly, 
was pitched high, and had commonly a quality of bit- 
ter protest. He wore a grey cloth jacket suit and a 
silk hat on all occasions. He plumbed an abysmal 
trouser pocket with a vast red hand, paid his cabman, 
and came panting resolutely up the steps, a copy of 
the pink paper clutched about the middle like Jove’s 
thunderbolt in his hand. 


72 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“Skinner?” Bensington was saying, regardless of 
his approach. 

“Nothing about him,” said Redwood. “Bound 
to be eaten. Both of them. It’s too terrible. . . . 
Hullo! Cossar!” 

“This your stuff?” asked Cossar, waving the 
paper. 

“Well, why don’t you stop it?” he demanded. 

“ Can’t be Jiggered!” said Cossar. 

“ Buy the place?” he cried. “What nonsense! 
Burn it. I knew you chaps would fumble this. 
What are you to do? Why — what I tell you! 

“You? Do? Why ! Go up the street to the gun- 
smith’s, of course. Why? For guns! Yes — there’s 
only one shop. Get eight guns ! Rifles. Not ele- 
phant guns — no! Too big. Not army rifles — too 
small. Say it’s to kill — kill a bull. Say it’s to shoot 
buffalo! See? Eh? Rats? No! How the deuce 
are they to understand that? . . . Because we 

want eight. Get a lot of ammunition. Don’t get 
guns without ammunition — No! Take the lot in a 
cab to — where’s the place? Ur shot? Charing 
Cross, then. There’s a train — Well, the first train 
that starts after two. Think you can do it? All 
right. License? Get eight at a post-office, of course. 
Gun licenses, you know. Not game. Why? It’s 
rats, man. You — Bensington. Got a telephone? 
Yes. I’ll ring up five of my chaps from Ealing. 
Why five? Because it’s the right number! 

“Where you going, Redwood? Get a hat! Non - 


THE GIANT RATS 


CH. Ill 


73 


sense . Have mine. You want guns, man — not hats. 
Got money? Enough? All right. So long. 

“Where’s the telephone, Bensington?” 

Bensington wheeled about obediently and led the 
way. 

Cossar used and replaced the instrument. “Then 
there’s the wasps,” he said. “Sulphur and nitre’ll do 
that. Obviously. Plaster of Paris. You’re a chem- 
ist. Where can I get sulphur by the ton in portable 
sacks? What for? Why, Lord bless my heart and 
soul ! — to smoke out the nest, of course ! I suppose 
it must be sulphur, eh? You’re a chemist. Sulphur 
best, eh?” 

“Yes, I should think sulphur.” 

“Nothing better? 

“Right. That’s your job. That’s all right. Get as 
much sulphur as you can — saltpetre to make it burn. 
Sent? Charing Cross. Right away. See they do 
it. Follow it up. Anything?” 

He thought a moment. 

“Plaster of Paris — any sort of plaster — bung up 
nest — holes — you know. That Fd better get.” 

“How much?” 

“How much what?” 

“Sulphur.” 

“Ton. See?” 

Bensington tightened his glasses with a hand trem- 
ulous with determination. “Right,” he said, very 
curtly. 

“Money in your pocket?” asked Cossar. 


74 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“Hang cheques. They may not know you. Pay 
cash. Obviously. Where’s your bank? All right. 
Stop on the way and get forty pounds — notes and 
gold.” 

Another meditation. “If we leave this job for 
public officials we shall have all Kent in tatters,” said 
Cossar. “Now is there — anything? No! HI!” 

He stretched a vast hand towards a cab that be- 
came convulsively eager to serve him (“Cab, Sir?” 
said the cabman. “Obviously,” said Cossar) ; and 
Bensington, still hatless, paddled down the steps and 
prepared to mount. 

“I think,” he said with his hand on the cab 
apron, and a sudden glance up at the windows of his 
flat, “I ought to tell my cousin Jane ” 

“More time to tell her when you come back,” said 
Cossar, thrusting him in with a vast hand expanded 
over his back. 

“Clever chaps,” remarked Cossar, “but no initia- 
tive whatever. Cousin Jane indeed! I know her. 
Rot, these cousin Janes! Country infested with ’em. 
I suppose I shall have to spend the whole blessed 
night, seeing they do what they know perfectly well 
they ought to do all along. I wonder if it’s Research 
makes ’em like that or Cousin Jane or what?” 

He dismissed this obscure problem, meditated for 
a space upon his watch, and decided there would be 
just time to drop into a restaurant and get some lunch 
before he hunted up the plaster of Paris and took it 
to Charing Cross. 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


75 


The train started at five minutes past three, and 
he arrived at Charing Cross at a quarter to three, to 
find Bensington in heated argument between two po- 
licemen and his van-driver outside, and Redwood in 
the luggage office involved in some technical obscurity 
about his ammunition. Everybody was pretending 
not to know anything or to have any authority, in the 
way dear to South-Eastern officials when they catch 
you in a hurry. 

“Pity they can’t shoot all these officials and get a 
new lot,” remarked Cossar with a sigh. But the time 
was too limited for anything fundamental, and so he 
swept through these minor controversies, disinterred 
what may or may not have been the station-master 
from some obscure hiding-place, walked about the 
premises holding him and giving orders in his name, 
and was out of the station with everybody and every- 
thing aboard before that official was fully awake to 
the breaches in the most sacred routines and regula- 
tions that were being committed. 

“Who was he?” said the high official, caressing the 
arm Cossar had gripped, and smiling with knit 
brows. 

“ ’E was a gentleman, Sir,” said a porter, “any- 
how. ’Im and all ’is party travelled first class.” 

“Well, we got him and his stuff off pretty sharp — 
whoever he was,” said the high official, rubbing his 
arm with something approaching satisfaction. 

And as he walked slowly back, blinking in the un- 
accustomed daylight, towards that dignified retire- 


76 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

ment in which the higher officials at Charing Cross 
shelter from the importunity of the vulgar, he smiled 
still at his unaccustomed energy. It was a very grati- 
fying revelation of his own possibilities, in spite of 
the stiffness of his arm. He wished some of those 
confounded arm-chair critics of railway management 
could have seen it. 


IV 

By five o’clock that evening this amazing Cossar, 
with no appearance of hurry at all, had got all the 
stuff for his fight with insurgent Bigness out of Ur- 
shot and on the road to Hickleybrow. Two barrels 
of paraffin and a load of dry brushwood he had 
bought in Urshot; plentiful sacks of sulphur, eight 
big game guns and ammunition, three light breech- 
loaders, with small-shot ammunition for the wasps, 
a hatchet, two billhooks, a pick and three spades, two 
coils of rope, some bottled beer, soda and whisky, 
one gross of packets of rat poison and cold provi- 
sions for three days had come down from London. 
All these things he had sent on in a coal trolley and 
a hay waggon in the most businesslike way, except 
the guns and ammunition, which were stuck under the 
seat of the Red Lion waggonette appointed to bring 
on Redwood and the five picked men who had come 
up from Ealing at Cossar’s summons. 

Cossar conducted all these transactions with an in- 
vincible air of commonplace, in spite of the fact that 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


77 


Urshot was in a panic about the rats, and all the 
drivers had to be specially paid. All the shops were 
shut in the place, and scarcely a soul abroad in the 
street, and when he banged at a door a window was 
apt to open. He seemed to consider that the conduct 
of business from open windows was an entirely legiti- 
mate and obvious method. Finally he and Bensing- 
ton got the Red Lion dog-cart and set off with the 
waggonette, to overtake the baggage. They did this 
a little beyond the cross-roads, and so reached Hick- 
leybrow first. 

Bensington, with a gun between his knees, sitting 
beside Cossar in the dog-cart, developed a long ger- 
minated amazement. All they were doing was, no 
doubt, as Cossar insisted, quite the obvious thing to 
do, only — ! In England one so rarely does the 
obvious thing. He glanced from his neighbour’s 
feet to the boldly sketched hands upon the reins. Cos- 
sar had apparently never driven before, and he was 
keeping the line of least resistance down the middle 
of the road by some no doubt quite obvious but cer- 
tainly unusual light of his own. 

“Why don’t we all do the obvious?” thought Ben- 
sington. “How the world would travel if one did ! 
I wonder for instance why I don’t do such a lot of 
things I know would be all right to do — things I 
want to do. Is everybody like that, or is it peculiar 
to me!” He plunged into obscure speculation about 
the Will. He thought of the complex organised fu- 
tilities of the daily life, and in contrast with them the 


78 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

plain and manifest things to do, the sweet and splen- 
did things to do, that some incredible influences will 
never permit us to do. Cousin Jane? Cousin Jane 
he perceived was important in the question, in some 
subtle and difficult way. Why should we after all 
eat, drink, and sleep, remain unmarried, go here, ab- 
stain from going there, all out of deference to Cousin 
Jane? She became symbolical without ceasing to be 
incomprehensible ! . . . 

A stile and a path across the fields caught his eye 
and reminded him of that other bright day, so recent 
in time, so remote in its emotions, when he had 
walked from Urshot to the Experimental Farm to 
see the giant chicks. 

Fate plays with us. 

“Tcheck, Tcheck,” said Cossar. “Get up.” 

It was a hot midday afternoon, not a breath of 
wind, and the dust was thick in the roads. Few peo- 
ple were about, but the deer beyond the park palings 
browsed in profound tranquillity. They saw a couple 
of big wasps stripping a gooseberry bush just outside 
Hickleybrow and another was crawling up and down 
the front of the little grocer’s shop in the village 
street trying to find an entry. The grocer was dimly 
visible within, with an ancient fowling-piece in hand, 
watching its endeavours. The driver of the waggon- 
ette pulled up outside the Jolly Drovers and informed 
Redwood that his part of the bargain was done. In 
this contention he was presently joined by the drivers 
of the waggon and the trolley. Not only did they 


THE GIANT RATS 


CH. Ill 


79 


maintain this, but they refused to let the horses be 
taken further. 

“Them big rats is nuts on ’orses,” the trolley driver 
kept on repeating. 

Cossar surveyed the controversy for a moment. 

“Get the things out of that waggonette,” he said, 
and one of his men, a tall, fair, dirty engineer, 
obeyed. 

“Gimme that shot gun,” said Cossar. 

He placed himself between the drivers. “We 
don’t want you to drive,” he said. 

“You can say what you like,” he conceded, “but 
we want these horses.” 

They began to argue, but he continued speaking. 

“If you try and assault us I shall, in self-defence, 
let fly at your legs. The horses are going on.” 

He treated the incident as closed. “Get up on that 
waggon, Flack,” he said to a thickset, wiry little man. 
“Boon, take the trolley.” 

The two drivers blustered to Redwood. 

“You’ve done your duty to your employers,” said 
Redwood. “You stop in this village until we come 
back. No one will blame you, seeing we’ve got 
guns. We’ve no wish to do anything unjust or vio- 
lent, but this occasion is pressing. I’ll pay if any- 
thing happens to the horses, never fear. 

“That’s all right,” said Cossar, who rarely prom- 
ised. 

They left the waggonette behind, and the men who 
were not driving went afoot. Over each shoulder 


8o 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


sloped a gun. It was the oddest little expedition for 
an English country road, more like a Yankee party, 
trecking west in the good old Indian days. 

They went up the road until at the crest by the 
stile they came into sight of the Experimental Farm. 
They found a little group of men there with a gun or 
so — the two Fulchers were among them — and one 
man, a stranger from Maidstone, stood out before 
the others and watched the place through an opera- 
glass. 

These men turned about and stared at Redwood’s 
party. 

“Anything fresh?” said Cossar. 

“The waspses keeps a cornin’ and a goin’ ” said 
old Fulcher. “Can’t see as they bring anything.” 

“The canary creeper’s got in among the pine trees 
now,” said the man with the lorgnette. “It wasn’t 
there this morning. You can see it grow while you 
watch it.” 

He took out a handkerchief and wiped his object- 
glasses with careful deliberation. 

“I reckon you’re going down there,” ventured 
Skelmersdale. 

“Will you come?” said Cossar. 

Skelmersdale seemed to hesitate. 

“It’s an all-night job.” 

Skelmersdale decided that he wouldn’t. 

“Rats about?” asked Cossar. 

“One was up in the pines this morning — rabbiting, 
we reckon.” 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


81 


Cossar slouched on to overtake his party. 

Bensington, regarding the Experimental Farm un- 
der his hand, was able to gauge now the vigour of 
the Food. His first impression was that the house 
was smaller than he had thought, very much smaller ; 
his second was to perceive that all the vegetation be- 
tween the house and the pine wood had become ex- 
tremely large. The roof over the well peeped amidst 
tussocks of grass a good eight feet high, and the 
Canary Creeper wrapped about the chimney stack 
and gesticulated with stiff tendrils towards the heav- 
ens. Its flower s were vivid yellow spashes, dis- 
tinctly visible as separate specks this mile away. A 
great green cable had writhed across the big wire in- 
closures of the giant hens’ run, and flung twining leaf 
stems about two outstanding pines. Fully half as tall 
as these was the grove of nettles running round be- 
hind the cart-shed. The whole prospect, as they 
drew nearer, became more and more suggestive of a 
raid of pigmies upon a dolls’ house that has been left 
in a neglected corner of some great garden. 

There was a busy coming and going from the 
wasps’ nest, they saw. A swarm of black shapes in- 
terlaced in the air above the rusty hill front beyond 
the pine cluster, and ever and again one of these 
would dart up into the sky with incredible swiftness 
and soar off upon some distant quest. Their hum- 
ming became audible at more than half a mile’s dis- 
tance from the Experimental Farm. Once a yellow- 
striped monster dropped towards them and hung for 


82 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


a space watching them with its great compound eyes, 
but at an ineffectual shot from Cossar it darted off 
again. Down in a corner of the field, away to the 
right, several were crawling about over some ragged 
bones that were probably the remains of the lamb the 
rats had brought from Huxter’s Farm. The horses 
became very restless as they drew near these creat- 
ures. None of the party was an expert driver, and 
they had to put a man to lead each horse and encour- 
age it with the voice. 

They could see nothing of the rats as they came 
up to the house, and everything seemed perfectly still 
except for the rising and falling “whoozzzzzzZZZ, 
whoooozoo-oo” of the wasps’ nest. 

They led the horses into the yard, and one of Cos- 
sar’s men, seeing the door open — the whole of the 
middle portion of the door had been gnawed out — 
walked into the house. Nobody missed him for the 
time, the rest being occupied with the barrels of par- 
affin, and the first intimation they had of his separa- 
tion from them was the report of his gun and the 
whizz of his bullet. “Bang, bang,” both barrels, and 
his first bullet it seems went through the cask of sul- 
phur, smashed out a stave from the further side, and 
filled the air with yellow dust. Redwood had kept 
his gun in hand and let fly at something grey that 
leapt past him. He had a vision of the broad hind 
quarters, the long scaly tail and long soles of the 
hind feet of a rat, and fired his second barrel. He 


ch. in THE GIANT RATS 83 

saw Bensington drop as the beast vanished round the 
corner. 

Then for a time everybody was busy with a gun. 
For three minutes lives were cheap at the Experi- 
mental Farm, and the banging of guns filled the air. 
Redwood, careless of Bensington in his excitement, 
rushed in pursuit, and was knocked headlong by a 
mass of brick fragments, mortar, plaster, and rotten 
lath splinters that came flying out at him as a bullet 
whacked through the wall. 

He found himself sitting on the ground with blood 
on his hands and lips, and a great stillness brooded 
over all about him. 

Then a flattish voice from within the house re- 
marked: “Gee-whizz!” 

“Hullo!” said Redwood. 

“Hullo there!” answered the voice. 

And then: “Did you chaps get ’im?” 

A sense of the duties of friendship returned to 
Redwood. “Is Mr. Bensington hurt?” he said. 

The man inside heard imperfectly. “No one ain’t 
to blame if I ain’t,” said the voice inside. 

It became clearer to Redwood that he must have 
shot Bensington. He forgot the cuts upon his face, 
arose and came back to find Bensington seated on the 
ground and rubbing his shoulder. Bensington looked 
over his glasses. “We peppered him, Redwood,” he 
said, and then: “He tried to jump over me, and 
knocked me down. But I let him have it with both 


84 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

barrels, and my ! how it has hurt my shoulder to be 
sure !” 

A man appeared in the doorway. “I got him once 
in the chest and once in the side,” he said. 

“Where’s the waggons?” said Cossar, appearing 
amidst a thicket of gigantic canary-creeper leaves. 

It became evident, to Redwood’s amazement, first, 
that no one had been shot, and, secondly, that the 
trolley and waggon had shifted fifty yards, and were 
now standing with interlocked wheels amidst the tan- 
gled distortions of Skinner’s kitchen garden. The 
horses had stopped their plunging. Half way tow- 
ards them, the burst barrel of sulphur lay in the 
path with a cloud of sulphur dust above it. He indi- 
cated this to Cossar and walked towards it. “Has 
any one seen that rat?” shouted Cossar, following. 
“I got him in between the ribs once, and once in the 
face as he turned on me.” 

They were joined by two men, as they worried at 
the locked wheels. 

“I killed that rat,” said one of the men. 

“Have they got him?” asked Cossar. 

“Jim Bates has found him, beyond the hedge. I 
got him jest as he came round the corner. 

Whack behind the shoulder. . . .” 

When things were a little shipshape again Red- 
wood went and stared at the huge misshapen corpse. 
The brute lay on its side, with its body slightly bent. 
Its rodent teeth overhanging its receding lower jaw 
gave its face a look of colossal feebleness, of weak 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


85 


avidity. It seemed not in the least ferocious or terri- 
ble. Its fore paws reminded him of lank emaciated 
hands. Except for one neat round hole with a 
scorched rim on either side of its neck, the creature 
was absolutely intact. He meditated over this fact 
for some time. “There must have been two rats,” 
he said at last, turning away. 

“Yes. And the one that everybody hit — got 
away.” 

“I am certain that my own shot ” 

A canary-creeper leaf tendril, engaged in that mys- 
terious search for a holdfast which constitutes a ten- 
dril’s career, bent itself engagingly towards his neck 
and made him step aside hastily. 

“Whoo-z-z-z-z-z-z-Z-Z-Z,” from the distant wasps’ 
nest, “whoo-oo-zoo-oo.” 


V 

This incident left the party alert but not un- 
strung. 

They got their stores into the house, which had 
evidently been ransacked by the rats after the flight 
of Mrs. Skinner, and four of the men took the two 
horses back to Hickleybrow. They dragged the dead 
rat through the hedge and into a position commanded 
by the windows of the house, and incidentally came 
upon a cluster of giant earwigs in the ditch. These 
creatures dispersed hastily, but Cossar reached out 
incalculable limbs and managed to kill several with 


86 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


his boots and gun-butt. Then two of the men hacked 
through several of the main stems of the canary- 
creeper — huge cylinders they were, a couple of feet 
in diameter, that came out by the sink at the back; 
and while Cossar set the house in order for the night, 
Bensington, Redwood, and one of the assistant elec- 
tricians went cautiously round by the fowl-runs in 
search of the rat-holes. 

They skirted the giant nettles widely, for these 
huge weeds threatened them with poison-thorns a 
good inch long. Then round beyond the gnawed, 
dismantled stile they came abruptly on the huge cav- 
ernous throat of the most westerly of the giant rat- 
holes, an evil-smelling profundity, that drew them up 
into a line together. 

“I hope they’ll come out,” said Redwood, with a 
glance at the pent-house of the well. 

“If they don’t — ” reflected Bensington. 

“They will,” said Redwood. 

They meditated. 

“We shall have to rig up some sort of flare if we 
do go in,” said Redwood. 

They went up a little path of white sand through 
the pine wood and halted presently within sight of the 
wasp-holes. 

The sun was setting now, and the wasps were com- 
ing home for good; their wings in the golden light 
made twirling haloes about them. The three men 
peered out from under the trees — they did not care 
to go right to the edge of the wood — and watched 


ch. hi THE GIANT RATS 87 

these tremendous insects drop and crawl for a little 
and enter and disappear. “They will be still in a 
couple of hours from now,” said Redwood. . . 

“This is like being a boy again.” 

“We can’t miss those holes,” said Bensington, 
“even if the night is dark. By the bye — about the 
light ” 

“Full moon,” said the electrician. “I looked it 
up.” 

They went back and consulted with Cossar. 

He said that “obviously” they must get the sulphur, 
nitre, and plaster of Paris through the wood before 
twilight, and for that they broke bulk and carried the 
sacks. After the necessary shouting of the prelimi- 
nary directions, never a word was spoken, and as the 
buzzing of the wasps’ nest died away there was 
scarcely a sound in the world but the noise of foot- 
steps, the heavy breathing of burthened men, and the 
thud of the sacks. They all took turns at that labour 
except Mr. Bensington, who was manifestly unfit. He 
took post in the Skinner’s bedroom with a rifle, to 
watch the carcass of the dead rat, and of the others, 
they took turns to rest from sack-carrying and to keep 
watch two at a time upon the rat-holes behind the 
nettle grove. The pollen sacs of the nettles were ripe, 
and every now and then the vigil would be enlivened 
by the dehiscence of these, the bursting of the sacs 
sounding exactly like the crack of a pistol, and the 
pollen grains as big as buckshot pattered all about 
them. 


88 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


Mr. Bensington sat at his window on a hard horse- 
hair-stuffed arm-chair, covered by a grubby anti- 
macassar that had given a touch of social distinction 
to the Skinners’ sitting-room for many years. His 
unaccustomed rifle rested on the sill, and his spectacles 
anon watched the dark bulk of the dead rat in the 
thickening twilight, anon wandered about him in curi- 
ous meditation. There was a faint smell of paraffin 
without, for one of the casks leaked, and it mingled 
with a less unpleasant odour arising from the hacked 
and crushed creeper. 

Within, when he turned his head, a blend of faint 
domestic scents, beer, cheese, rotten apples, and old 
boots as the leading motifs, was full of reminiscences 
of the vanished Skinners. He regarded the dim room 
for a space. The furniture had been greatly disor- 
dered — perhaps by some inquisitive rat — but a coat 
upon a clothes-peg on the door, a razor and some dirty 
scraps of paper, and a piece of soap that had hardened 
through years of disuse into a horny cube, were redo- 
lent of Skinner’s distinctive personality. It came to 
Bensington’s mind with a complete novelty of relaxa- 
tion that in all probability the man had been killed 
and eaten, at least in part, by the monster that now 
lay dead there in the darkling. 

To think of all that a harmless-looking discovery 
in chemistry may lead to ! 

Here he was in homely England and yet in infinite 
danger, sitting out alone with a gun in a twilit, 
ruined house, remote from every comfort, his shoul- 


ch. hi THE GIANT RATS 89 

der dreadfully bruised from a gun-kick, and — by 
Jove ! 

He grasped now how profoundly the order of the 
universe had changed for him. He had come right 
away to this amazing experience, without even saying 
a word to his cousin Jane! 

What must she be thinking of him ? 

He tried to imagine it and he could not. He had 
an extraordinary feeling that she and he were parted 
forever and would never meet again. He felt he had 
taken a step and come into a world of new immensi- 
ties. What other monsters might not those deepen- 
ing shadows hide? . . . The tips of the giant 

nettles came out sharp and black against the pale 
green and amber of the western sky. Everything was 
very still, very still indeed. He wondered why he 
could not hear the others away there round the corner 
of the house. The shadow in the cart-shed was now 
an abysmal black. 

Bang . . . Bang . . . Bang . 

A sequence of echoes and a shout. 

A long silence. 

Bang and a diminuendo of echoes. 

Stillness. 

Then, thank goodness ! Redwood and Cossar were 
coming out of the inaudible darknesses, and Redwood 
was calling “Bensington !” 

“Bensington ! We’ve bagged another of the rats 1 ” 

“Cossar’s bagged another of the rats!” 


9 ° 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


VI 

When the Expedition had finished refreshment, 
the night had fully come. The stars were at their 
brightest, and a growing pallor towards Hankey her- 
alded the moon. The watch on the rat-holes had 
been maintained, but the watchers had shifted to the 
hill slope above the holes, feeling this a safer firing- 
point. They squatted there in a rather abundant dew, 
fighting the damp with whisky. The others rested in 
the house, and the three leaders discussed the night’s 
work with the men. The moon rose towards mid- 
night, and as soon as it was clear of the downs, every 
one except the rat-hole sentinels started off in single 
file, led by Cossar, towards the wasps’ nest. 

So far as the wasps’ nest went, they found their 
task exceptionally easy, astonishingly easy. Except 
that it was a longer labour, it was no graver affair 
than any common wasps’ nest might have been. 
Danger there was, no doubt, danger to life, but it 
never so much as thrust its head out of that porten- 
tous hillside. They stuffed in the sulphur and nitre, 
they bunged the holes soundly, and fired their trains. 
Then with a common impulse all the party but Cossar 
turned and ran athwart the long shadows of the pines, 
and, finding Cossar had stayed behind, came to a halt 
together in a knot, a hundred yards away, convenient 
to a ditch that offered cover. Just for a minute or 
two the moonlit night, all black and white, was heavy 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


9i 


with a suffocated buzz, that rose and mingled to a 
roar, a deep abundant note, and culminated and died, 
and then almost incredibly the night was still. 

“By Jove!” said Bensington, almost in a whisper, 

“its doner 

All stood intent. The hillside above the black 
point-lace of the pine shadows seemed as bright as 
day and as colourless as snow. The setting plaster in 
the holes positively shone. Cossar’s loose frame- 
work moved toward them. 

“So far — ” said Cossar. 

“Crack — bang !” 

A shot from near the house and then — stillness. 

“What’s that?” said Bensington. 

“One of the rats put its head out,” suggested one 
of the men. 

“By the bye, we left our guns up there,” said Red- 
wood. 

“By the sacks.” 

Every one began to walk towards the hill again. 

“That must be the rats,” said Bensington. 

“Obviously,” said Cossar, gnawing his finger nails. 

“Bang!” 

“Hullo?” said one of the men. 

Then abruptly came a shout, two shots, a loud 
shout that was almost a scream, three shots in rapid 
succession and a splintering of wood. All these 
sounds were very clear and very small in the immense 
stillness of the night. Then for some moments noth- 
ing but a minute muffled confusion from the direction 


92 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


of the rat-holes, and then again a wild yell. . . . 

Each man found himself running hard for the guns. 

Two shots. 

Bensington found himself, gun in hand, going hard 
through the pine-trees after a number of receding 
backs. It is curious that the thought uppermost in 
his mind at that moment was the wish that his cousin 
Jane could see him. His bulbous slashed boots flew 
out in wild strides and his face was distorted into a 
permanent grin, because that wrinkled his nose and 
kept his glasses in place. Also he held the muzzle 
of his gun projecting straight before him as he flew 
through the chequered moonlight. The man who 
had run away met them full tilt — he had dropped his 
gun. 

“Hullo,” said Cossar, and caught him in his arms. 
“What’s this?” 

“They came out together,” said the man. 

“The rats?” 

“Yes, six of them.” 

“Where’s Flack?” 

“Down.” 

“What’s he say?” panted Bensington, coming up, 
unheeded. 

“Flack’s down?” 

“He fell down.” 

“They came out one after the other.” 

“What?” 

“Made a rush. I fired both barrels first.” 

“You left Flack?” 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


93 


“They were on to us.” 

“Come on,” said Cossar. You come with us. 
Where’s Flack? Show us.” 

The whole party moved forward. Further details 
of the engagement dropped from the man who had 
run away. The others clustered about him, except 
Cossar, who led. 

“Where are they?” 

“Back in their holes, perhaps. I cleared. They 
made a rush for their holes.” 

“What do you mean ? Did you get behind them ?” 

“We got down by their holes. Saw ’em come out, 
you know, and tried to cut ’em off. They lollopped 
out — like rabbits. We ran down and let fly. They 
ran about wild after our first shot and suddenly came 
at us. Went for us.” 

“How many?” 

“Six or seven.” 

Cossar led the way to the edge of the pine wood 
and halted. 

“D’yer mean they got Flack?” asked some one. 

“One of ’em was on to him.” 

“Didn’t you shoot?” 

“How could U” 

“Every one loaded?” said Cossar over his shoulder. 

There was a confirmatory movement. 

“But Flack — ” said one. 

“D’yer mean — Flack — ” said another. 

“There’s no time to lose,” said Cossar, and shouted 
“Flack!” as he led the way. The whole force ad- 


94 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


vanced towards the rat-holes, the man who had run 
away a little to the rear. They went forward through 
the rank exaggerated weeds and skirted the body of 
the second dead rat. They were extended in a bunchy 
line, each man with his gun pointing forward, and 
they peered about them in the clear moonlight for 
some crumpled ominous shape, some crouching form. 
They found the gun of the man who had run away 
very speedily. 

“Flack!” cried Cossar. “Flack!” 

“He ran past the nettles and fell down,” volun- 
teered the man who ran away. 

“Where?” 

“Round about there.” 

“Where did he fall?” 

He hesitated and led them athwart the long black 
shadows for a space and turned judicially. “About 
here, I think.” 

“Well, he’s not here now.” 

“But his gun ?” 

“Confound it!” swore Cossar, “where’s everything 
got to ?” He strode a step towards the black shadows 
on the hillside that masked the holes and stood star- 
ing. Then he swore again. “If they have dragged 
him in !” 

So they hung for a space tossing each other the 
fragments of thoughts. Bensington’s glasses flashed 
like diamonds as he looked from one to the other. 
The men’s faces changed from cold clearness to mys- 
terious obscurity as they turned them to or from the 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


95 


moon. Every one spoke, no one completed a sen- 
tence. Then abruptly Cossar chose his line. He 
flapped limbs this way and that and expelled orders 
in pellets. It was obvious he wanted lamps. Every 
one except Cossar was moving towards the house. 

“You’re going into the holes?” asked Redwood. 

“Obviously,” said Cossar. 

He made it clear once more that the lamps of 
the cart and trolley were to be got and brought to 
him. 

Bensington, grasping this, started off along the path 
by the well. He glanced over his shoulder and saw 
Cossar’s gigantic figure standing out as if he were 
regarding the holes pensively. At the sight Ben- 
sington halted for a moment and half turned. They 
were all leaving Cossar ! 

Cossar was able to take care of himself, of course 1 

Suddenly Bensington saw something that made 
him shout a windless “hi !” In a second three rats 
had projected themselves from the dark tangle of the 
creeper towards Cossar. For three seconds Cossar 
stood unaware of them, and then he had become the 
most active thing in the world. He didn’t fire his 
gun. Apparently he had no time to aim, or to think 
of aiming; he ducked a leaping rat, Bensington saw, 
and then smashed at the back of its head with the butt 
of his gun. The monster gave one leap and fell over 
itself. 

Cossar’s form went right down out of sight among 
the reedy grass, and then he rose again, running tow- 


96 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

ards another of the rats and whirling his gun over- 
head. A faint shout came to Bensington’s ears, and 
then he perceived the remaining two rats bolt- 
ing divergently, and Cossar in pursuit towards the 
holes. 

The whole thing was an affair of misty shadows ; all 
three fighting monsters were exaggerated and made 
unreal by the delusive clearness of the light. At mo- 
ments Cossar was colossal, at moments invisible. The 
rats flashed athwart the eye in sudden unexpected 
leaps, or ran with a movement of the feet so swift, 
they seemed to run on wheels. It was all over in half 
a minute. No one saw it but Bensington. He could 
hear the others behind him still receding towards the 
house. He shouted something inarticulate and then 
ran back towards Cossar, while the rats vanished. 

He came up to him outside the holes. In the moon- 
light the distribution of shadows that constituted Cos- 
sar’s visage intimated calm. “Hullo,” said Cossar, 
“back already?” Where’s the lamps? They’re all 
back now in their holes. One I broke the neck of as 
it ran past me. . . . See? There!” And he 

pointed a gaunt finger. 

Bensington was too astonished for conversa- 
tion. . . . 

The lamps seemed an interminable time in coming. 
At last they appeared, first one unwinking luminous 
eye, preceded by a swaying yellow glare, and then, 
winking now and then, and then shining out again, 
two others. About them came little figures with little 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


97 


voices, and then enormous shadows. This group 
made as it were a spot of inflammation upon the gi- 
gantic dreamland of moonshine. 

“Flack,” said the voices. “Flack.” 

An illuminating sentence floated up. “Locked him- 
self in the attic.” 

Cossar was continually more wonderful. He pro- 
duced great handfuls of cotton wool and stuffed them 
in his ears — Bensington wondered why. Then he 
loaded his gun with a quarter charge of powder. Who 
else could have thought of that? Wonderland cul- 
minated with the disappearance of Cossar’s twin 
realms of boot sole up the central hole. 

Cossar was on all fours with two guns, one trailing 
on each side from a string under his chin, and his most 
trusted assistant, a little dark man with a grave face, 
was to go in stooping behind him, holding a lantern 
over his head. Everything had been made as sane 
and obvious and proper as a lunatic’s dream. The 
wool, it seemed, was on account of the concussion of 
the rifle; the man had some, too. Obviously! So 
long as the rats turned tail on Cossar no harm could 
come to him, and directly they headed for him he 
would see their eyes and fire between them. Since 
they would have to come down the cylinder of the 
hole, Cossar could hardly fail to hit them. It was, 
Cossar insisted, the obvious method, a little tedious 
perhaps,, but absolutely certain. As the assistant 
stooped to enter, Bensington saw that the end of a 
ball of twine had been tied to the tail of his coat. By 


98 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

this he was to draw in the rope if it should be needed 
to drag out the bodies of the rats. 

Bensington perceived that the object he held in his 
hand was Cossar’s silk hat. 

How had it got there? . . . 

It would be something to remember him by, 
anyhow. 

At each of the adjacent holes stood a little group 
with a lantern on the ground shining up the hole, and 
with one man kneeling and aiming at the round void 
before him, waiting for anything that might emerge. 

There was an interminable suspense. 

Then they heard Cossar’s first shot, like an explo- 
sion in a mine. 

Every one’s nerves and muscles tightened at that, 
and bang ! bang ! bang ! the rats had tried a bolt, and 
two more were dead. Then the man who held the 
ball of twine reported a twitching. “He’s killed one 
in there,” said Bensington, “and he wants the rope.” 

He watched the rope creep into the hole, and it 
seemed as though it had become animated by a ser- 
pentine intelligence — for the darkness made the twine 
invisible. At last it stopped crawling, and there was 
a long pause. Then what seemed to Bensington the 
queerest monster of all crept slowly from the hole, 
and resolved itself into the little engineer emerging 
backwards. After him, and ploughing deep furrows, 
Cossar’s boots thrust out, and then came his lantern- 
illuminated back. . . . 

Only one rat was left alive now, and this poor, 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


99 


doomed wretch cowered in the inmost recesses until 
Cossar and the lantern went in again and slew it, and 
finally Cossar, that human ferret, went through all 
the runs to make sure. 

“We got ’em,” he said to his nearly awe-stricken 
company at last. “And if I hadn’t been a mud-headed 
mucker I should have stripped to the waist. Ob- 
viously. Feel my sleeves, Bensington! I’m wet 
through with perspiration. Jolly hard to think of 
everything. Only a halfway-up of whisky can save 
me from a cold.” 


VII 

There were moments during that wonderful night 
when it seemed to Bensington that he was planned by 
nature for a life of fantastic adventure. This was 
particularly the case for an hour or so after he had 
taken a stiff whisky. “Shan’ go back to Sloane Street,” 
he confided to the tall, fair, dirty engineer. 

“You won’t, eh?” 

“No fear,” said Bensington, nodding darkly. 

The exertion of dragging the seven dead rats to 
the funeral pyre by the nettle grove left him bathed 
in perspiration, and Cossar pointed out the obvious 
physical reaction of whisky to save him from the oth- 
erwise inevitable chill. There was a sort of brigand’s 
supper in the old bricked kitchen, with the row of 
dead rats lying in the moonlight against the hen-runs 
outside, and after thirty minutes or so of rest Cossar 


L.ofC. 


IOO 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


roused them all to the labours that were still to do. 
“Obviously,” as he said, they had to “wipe the place 
out. No litter — no scandal. See?” He stirred 
them up to the idea of making destruction complete. 
They smashed and splintered every fragment of wood 
in the house; they built trails of chopped wood wher- 
ever big vegetation was springing; they made a pyre 
for the rat bodies and soaked them in paraffin. 

Bensington worked like a conscientious navvy. He 
had a sort of climax of exhilaration and energy to- 
wards two o’clock. When in the work of destruction 
he wielded an axe the bravest fled his neighbourhood. 
Afterwards he was a little sobered by the temporary 
loss of his spectacles, which were found for him at 
last in his side coat-pocket. 

Men went to and fro about him — grimy, energetic 
men. Cossar moved amongst them like a god. 

Bensington drank that delight of human fellow- 
ship that comes to happy armies, to sturdy expedi- 
tions — never to those who live the life of the sober 
citizen in cities. After Cossar had taken his axe away 
and set him to carry wood he went to and fro, saying 
they were all “good fellows.” He kept on — long 
after he was aware of fatigue. 

At last all was ready and the broaching of the 
paraffin began. The moon, robbed now of all its 
meagre night retinue of stars, shone high above the 
dawn. 

“Burn everything,” said Cossar, going to and fro, 
“burn the ground and make a clean sweep of it. See ?” 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


IOI 


Bensington became aware of him, looking now very 
gaunt and horrible in the pale beginnings of the day- 
light, hurrying past with his lower jaw projected and 
a flaring torch of touchwood in his hand. 

“Come away!” said some one, pulling Bensington’s 
arm. 

The still dawn — no birds were singing there — was 
suddenly full of a tumultuous crackling; a little dull 
red flame ran about the base of the pyre, changed to 
blue upon the ground, and set out to clamber, leaf by 
leaf, up the stem of a giant nettle. A singing sound 
mingled with the crackling. 

They snatched their guns from the corner of the 
Skinners’ living-room, and then every one was run- 
ning. Cossar came after them with heavy strides. . . . 

Then they were standing looking back at the Ex- 
perimental Farm. It was boiling up; the smoke and 
flames poured out like a crowd in a panic, from doors 
and windows and from a thousand cracks and crevices 
in the roof. Trust Cossar to build a fire! A great 
column of smoke, shot with blood-red tongues and 
darting flashes, rushed up into the sky. It was like 
some huge giant suddenly standing up, straining up- 
ward and abruptly spreading his great arms out 
across the sky. It cast the night back upon them, 
utterly hiding and obliterating the incandescence of 
the sun that rose behind it. All Hickleybrow was 
soon aware of that stupendous pillar of smoke, and 
came out upon the crest, in various deshabille , to 
watch them coming. 


io2 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


Behind, like some fantastic fungus, this smoke pil- 
lar swayed and fluctuated, up, up, into the sky — mak- 
ing the Downs seem low and all other objects petty, 
and in the foreground, led by Cossar, the makers of 
this mischief followed the path, eight little black 
figures coming wearily, guns shouldered, across the 
meadow. 

As Bensington looked back there came into his 
jaded brain, and echoed there, a familiar formula. 
What was it? “You have lit to-day — ?” “You 
have lit to-day ?” 

Then he remembered Latimer’s words: “We have 
lit this day such a Candle in England as no man may 
ever put out again ” 

What a man Cossar was, to be sure ! He admired 
his back view for a space and was proud to have held 
that hat. Proud! Although he was an eminent in- 
vestigator and Cossar only engaged in applied 
science. 

Suddenly he fell shivering and yawning enormously 
and wishing he was warmly tucked away in bed in 
his little flat that looked out upon Sloane Street. (It 
didn’t do even to think of Cousin Jane.) His legs 
became cotton strands, his feet lead. He wondered 
if any one would get them coffee in Hickleybrow. He 
had never been up all night for three and thirty years. 


CH. Ill 


THE GIANT RATS 


103 


VIII 

&nd while these eight adventurers fought with rats 
about the Experimental Farm, nine miles away, in the 
village of Cheasing Eyebright, an old lady with an 
excessive nose struggled with great difficulties by the 
light of a flickering candle. She gripped a sardine 
tin opener in one gnarled hand, and in the other she 
held a tin of Herakleophorbia, which she had resolved 
to open or die. She struggled indefatigably, grunting 
at each fresh effort, while through the flimsy partition 
the voice of the Caddies infant wailed. 

“Bless ’is poor ’art,” said Mrs. Skinner; and then, 
with her solitary tooth biting her lip in an ecstasy of 
determination, “Come up !” 

And presently, “Jab!” a fresh supply of the Food 
of the Gods was let loose to wreak its powers of 
giantry upon the world. 


CHAPTER THE FOURTH 


THE GIANT CHILDREN 

I 

For a time at least the spreading circle of residual 
consequences about the Experimental Farm must pass 
out of the focus of our narrative, how for a long time 
a power of bigness, in fungus and toadstool, in grass 
and weed, radiated from that charred but not abso- 
lutely obliterated centre. Nor can we tell here at any 
length how those mournful spinsters, the two surviv- 
ing hens, made a wonder of and a show, spent their 
remaining years in eggless celebrity. The reader who 
is hungry for fuller details in these matters is referred 
to the newspapers of the period, to the voluminous, 
indiscriminate files of the modern Recording Angel. 
Our business lies with Mr. Bensington at the focus of 
the disturbance. 

He had come back to London to find himself a 
quite terribly famous man. In a night the whole world 
had changed with respect to him. Everybody under- 
stood. Cousin Jane, it seemed, knew all about it; the 
people in the streets knew all about it; the newspapers 
all and more. To meet Cousin Jane was terrible, of 

104 


7 / 


i jH 


ch.iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


105 

course, but when it was over not so terrible after all. 
The good woman had limits even to her power over 
facts; it was clear that she had communed with her- 
self and accepted the Food as something in the nature 
of things. 

She took the line of huffy dutifulness. She disap- 
proved highly, it was evident, but she did not pro- 
hibit. The flight of Bensington, as she must have 
considered it, may have shaken her, and her worst 
was to treat him with bitter persistence for a cold he 
had not caught and fatigue he had long since for- 
gotten, and to buy him a new sort of hygienic all- 
wool combination underwear that was as apt to get 
involved and turned partially inside out and partially 
not, and as difficult to get into for an absent-minded 
man, as — Society. And so for a space, and as far as 
this convenience left him leisure, he still continued to 
participate in the development of this new element 
in human history, the Food of the Gods. 

The public mind, following its own mysterious 
laws of selection, had chosen him as the one and only 
responsible Inventor and Promoter of this new won- 
der; it would hear nothing of Redwood, and without 
a protest it allowed Cossar to follow his natural im- 
pulse into a terribly prolific obscurity. Before he 
was aware of the drift of these things, Mr. Bensing- 
ton was, so to speak, stark and dissected upon the 
hoardings. His baldness, his curious general pink- 
ness, and his golden spectacles had become a national 
possession. Resolute young men with large expen- 


io 6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


sive-looking cameras and a general air of complete 
authorisation took possession of the flat for brief but 
fruitful periods, let off flash lights in it that filled it 
for days with dense, intolerable vapour, and retired 
to fill the pages of the syndicated magazines with 
their admirable photographs of Mr. Bensington com- 
plete and at home in his second best jacket and his 
slashed shoes. Other resolute-mannered persons of 
various ages and sexes dropped in and told him things 
about Boomfood — it was Punch first called the stuff 
“Boomfood” — and afterwards reproduced what they 
had said as his own original contribution to the Inter- 
view. The thing became quite an obsession with 
Broadbeam, the Popular Humourist. He scented 
another confounded thing he could not understand, 
and he fretted dreadfully in his efforts to “laugh the 
thing down.” One saw him in clubs, a great clumsy 
presence with the evidences of his midnight oil burn- 
ing manifest upon his large unwholesome face, ex- 
plaining to every one he could buttonhole: “These 
Scientific chaps, you know, haven’t a Sense of 
Humour, you know. That’s what it is. This Science 
— kills it.” His jests at Bensington became malig- 
nant libels. 

An enterprising press-cutting agency sent Bensing- 
ton a long article about himself from a sixpenny 
weekly, entitled “A New Terror,” and offered to sup- 
ply one hundred such disturbances for a guinea, and 
two extremely charming young ladies, totally un- 
known to him, called, and, to the speechless indigna- 


ch.iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


107 

tion of Cousin Jane, had tea with him and afterwards 
sent him their birthday books for his signature. He 
was speedily quite hardened to seeing his name asso- 
ciated with the most incongruous ideas in the public 
press, and to discover in the reviews articles written 
about Boomfood and himself in a tone of the utmost 
intimacy by people he had never heard of. And 
whatever delusions he may have cherished in the days 
of his obscurity about the pleasantness of Fame were 
dispelled utterly and forever. 

At first — except for Broadbeam — the tone of the 
public mind was quite free from any touch of hostil- 
ity. It did not seem to occur to the public mind as 
anything but a mere playful supposition that any 
more Herakleophorbia was going to escape again. 
And it did not seem to occur to the public mind that 
the growing little band of babies now being fed on 
the food would presently be growing more “up” than 
most of us ever grow. The sort of thing that pleased 
the public mind was caricatures of eminent politicians 
after a course of Boom-feeding, uses of the idea on 
hoardings, and such edifying exhibitions as the dead 
wasps that had escaped the fire and the remaining 
hens. 

Beyond that the public did not care to look, until 
very strenuous efforts were made to turn its eyes to 
the remoter consequences, and even then for a while 
its enthusiasm for action was partial. “There’s al- 
ways somethin’ New,” said the public — a public so 
glutted with novelty that it would hear of the earth 


io8 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


being split as one splits an apple without surprise, 
and, “I wonder what they’ll do next.” 

But there were one or two people outside the pub- 
lic, as it were, who did already take that further 
glance, and some it seems were frightened by what 
they saw there. There was young Caterham, for ex- 
ample, cousin of the Earl of Pewterstone, and one of 
the most promising of English politicians, who, tak- 
ing the risk of being thought a faddist, wrote a long 
article in the Nineteenth Century and After to sug- 
gest its total suppression. And — in certain of his 
moods, there was Bensington. 

“They don’t seem to realise — ” he said to Cos- 
sar. 

“No, they don’t.” 

“And do we? Sometimes, when I think of what 
it means — This poor child of Redwood’s — and, 
of course, your three . . . Forty feet high, 

perhaps! . . . After all, ought we to go on 

with it?” 

“Go on with it !” cried Cossar, convulsed with in- 
elegant astonishment and pitching his note higher 
than ever. “Of course you’ll go on with it ! What 
d’you think you were made for? Just to loaf about 
between meal-times? 

“Serious consequences,” he screamed, “of course ! 
Enormous. Obviously. Ob-viously. Why, man, 
it’s the only chance you’ll ever get of a serious conse- 
quence ! And you want to shirk it !” For a moment 
his indignation was speechless. “It’s downright 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


109 


Wicked!” he said at last, and repeated explosively, 
“Wicked!” 

But Bensington worked in his laboratory now with 
more emotion than zest. He couldn’t tell whether 
he wanted serious consequences to his life or not; he 
was a man of quiet tastes. It was a marvellous dis- 
covery, of course, quite marvellous — but — He 
had already become the proprietor of several acres 
of scorched, discredited property near Hickleybrow, 
at a price of nearly £90 an acre, and at times he was 
disposed to think this as serious a consequence of 
speculative chemistry as any unambitious man could 
wish. Of course he was Famous — terribly Famous. 
More than satisfying, altogether more than satisfy- 
ing, was the Fame he had attained. 

But the habit of Research was strong in him. . . . 

And at moments, rare moments in the laboratory 
chiefly, he would find something else than habit and 
Cossar’s arguments to urge him to his work. This 
little spectacled man, poised perhaps with his slashed 
shoes wrapped about the legs of his high stool and 
his hand upon the tweezer of his balance weights, 
would have again a flash of that adolescent vision, 
would have a momentary perception of the eternal 
unfolding of the seed that had been sown in his brain, 
would see as it were in the sky, behind the grotesque 
shapes and accidents of the present, the coming world 
of giants and all the mighty things the future has in 
store — vague and splendid, like some glittering pal- 
ace seen suddenly in the passing of a sunbeam far 


I IO 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


away. . . . And presently it would be with him 

as though that distant splendour had never shone 
upon his brain, and he would perceive nothing ahead 
but sinister shadows, vast declivities and darknesses, 
inhospitable immensities, cold, wild, and terrible 
things. 


II 

Amidst the complex and confused happenings, the 
impacts from the great outer world that constituted 
Mr. Bensington’s fame, a shining and active figure 
presently became conspicuous, became almost, as it 
were, a leader and marshal of these externalities in 
Mr. Bensington’s eyes. This was Doctor Winkles, 
that convincing young practitioner, who has already 
appeared in this story as the means whereby Red- 
wood was able to convey the Food to his son. Even 
before the great outbreak, it was evident that the 
mysterious powders Redwood had given him had 
awakened this gentleman’s interest immensely, and 
so soon as the first wasps came he was putting two 
and two together. 

He was the sort of doctor that is in manners, in 
morals, in methods and appearance, most succinctly 
and finally expressed by the word “rising.” He was 
large and fair, with a hard, alert, superficial, alumin- 
ium-coloured eye and hair like chalk mud, even-feat- 
ured and muscular about the clean-shaven mouth, 
erect in figure and energetic in movement, quick and 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


1 1 1 


spinning on the heel, and he wore long frock coats, 
black silk ties and plain gold studs and chains, and 
his silk hats had a special shape and brim that made 
him look wiser and better than anybody. He looked 
as young or old as anybody grown up. And after 
that first wonderful outbreak he took to Bensington 
and Redwood and the Food of the Gods with such a 
convincing air of proprietorship, that at times, in 
spite of the testimony of the Press to the contrary, 
Bensington was disposed to regard him as the orig- 
inal inventor of the whole affair. 

“These accidents,” said Winkles, when Bensington 
hinted at the dangers of further escapes, “are noth- 
ing. Nothing. The discovery is everything. Prop- 
erly developed, suitably handled, sanely controlled, 
we have — we have something very portentous indeed 
in this food of ours. . . . We must keep our 

eye on it. . . . We mustn’t let it out of control 

again, and — we mustn’t let it rest.” 

He certainly did not mean to do that. He was 
at Bensington’s now almost every day. Bensington, 
glancing from the window, would see the faultless 
equipage come spanking up Sloane Street, and after 
an incredibly brief interval Winkles would enter the 
room with a light, strong motion, and pervade it, and 
protrude some newspaper and supply information 
and make remarks. 

“Well,” he would say, rubbing his hands, “how 
are we getting on?” and so pass to the current discus- 
sion about it. 


112 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“Do you see,” he would say for example, “that 
Caterham has been talking about our stuff at the 
Church Association?” 

“Dear me!” said Bensington, “that’s a cousin of 
the Prime Minister, isn’t it?” 

“Yes,” said Winkles, “a very able young man — 
very able. Quite wrong-headed, you know, violently 
reactionary — but thoroughly able. And he’s evi- 
dently disposed to make capital out of this stuff of 
ours. Takes a very emphatic line. Talks of our pro- 
posal to use it in the elementary schools ” 

“Our proposal to use it in the elementary schools !” 

“/ said something about that the other day — quite 
in passing — little affair at a Polytechnic. Trying to 
make it clear the stuff was really highly beneficial. 
Not in the slightest degree dangerous, in spite of 
those first little accidents 0 Which cannot possibly oc- 
cur again. . . . You know it would be rather 

good stuff — But he’s taken it up.” 

“What did you say?” 

“Mere obvious nothings. But as you see — ! 
Takes it up with perfect gravity. Treats the thing 
as an attack. Says there is already a sufficient waste 
of public money in elementary schools without this. 
Tells the old stories about piano lessons again — you 
know. No one, he says, wishes to prevent the chil- 
dren of the lower classes obtaining an education 
suited to their condition, but to give them a food of 
this sort will be to destroy their sense of proportion 
utterly. Expands the topic. What Good will it do, 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


IX 3 

he asks, to make poor people six-and-thirty feet high? 
He really believes, you know, that they will be thirty- 
six feet high.” 

“So they would be,” said Bensington, “if you gave 
them our food at all regularly. But nobody said any- 
thing ” 

“/ said something.” 

“But, my dear Winkles !” 

“They’ll be Bigger, of course,” interrupted Win- 
kles, with an air of knowing all about it, and dis- 
couraging the crude ideas of Bensington. “Bigger 
indisputably. But listen to what he says! Will it 
make them happier? That’s his point. Curious, 
isn’t it? Will it make them better? Will they be 
more respectful to properly constituted authority? Is 
it fair to the children themselves? Curious how 
anxious his sort are for justice — so far as any future 
arrangements go. Even nowadays, he says, the cost 
of feeding and clothing children is more than many 
of their parents can contrive, and if this sort of thing 
is to be permitted — ! Eh? 

“You see he makes my mere passing suggestion 
into a positive proposal. And then he calculates how 
much a pair of breeches for a growing lad of twenty 
feet high or so will cost. Just as though he really 
believed — Ten pounds, he reckons, for the mer- 
est decency. Curious man, this Caterham ! So con- 
crete ! The honest and struggling ratepayer will have 
to contribute to that, he says. He says we have to 
consider the Rights of the Parent. It’s all here. Two 


1 1 4 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

columns. Every Parent has a right to have his chil- 
dren brought up in his own Size. 

“Then comes the question of school accommoda- 
tion, cost of enlarged desks and forms for our already 
too greatly burthened National Schools. And to get 
what? — a proletariat of hungry giants. Winds up 
with a very serious passage, says even if this wild sug- 
gestion — mere passing fancy of mine, you know, and 
misinterpreted at that — this wild suggestion about 
the schools comes to nothing that doesn’t end the mat- 
ter. This is a strange food, so strange as to seem to 
him almost wicked. It has been scattered recklessly 
— so he says — and it may be scattered again. Once 
you’ve taken it, it’s poison unless you go on with it. 
(“So it is,” said Bensington.) And in short he pro- 
poses the formation of a National Society for the 
Preservation of the Proper Proportions of Things. 
Odd? Eh? People are hanging on to the idea like 
anything.” 

“But what do they propose to do?” 

Winkles shrugged his shoulders and threw out his 
hands. “Form a Society,” he said, “and fuss. They 
want to make it illegal to manufacture this Herakleo- 
phorbia — or at any rate to circulate the knowledge 
of it. I’ve written about a bit to show that Cater- 
ham’s idea of the stuff is very much exaggerated, very 
much exaggerated indeed, but that doesn’t seem to 
check it. Curious how people are turning against it. 
And the National Temperance Association, by the 
bye, has founded a branch for Temperance in 
Growth.” 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


"5 

“Hm,” said Bensington, and stroked his nose. 

“After all that has happened there’s bound to be 
this uproar. On the face of it the thing’s — start - 
ling.” 

Winkles walked about the room for a time, hesi- 
tated, and departed. 

It became evident there was something at the back 
of his mind, some aspect of crucial importance to 
him, that he waited to display. One day, when 
Redwood and Bensington were at the flat to- 
gether, he gave them a glimpse of this something 
in reserve. 

“How’s it all going?” he said, rubbing his hands 
together. 

“We’re getting together a sort of report.” 

“For the Royal Society?” 

“Yes.” 

“Hm,” said Winkles, very profoundly, and walked 
to the hearth-rug. “Hm. But — Here’s the point. 
Ought you?” 

“Ought we — what?” 

“Ought you to publish?” 

“We’re not in the Middle Ages,” said Redwood. 

“I know.” 

“As Cossar says, swapping wisdom — that’s the 
true scientific method.” 

“In most cases, certainly. But — This is ex- 
ceptional.” 

“We shall put the whole thing before the Royal 
Society in the proper way,” said Redwood. 

Winkles returned to that on a later occasion. 


ii 6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


“It’s in many ways an Exceptional Discovery.” 

“That doesn’t matter,” said Redwood. 

“It’s the sort of knowledge that could easily be 
subject to grave abuse — grave dangers, as Caterham 
puts it.” 

Redwood said nothing. 

“Even carelessness, you know 

“If we were to form a committee of trustworthy 
people to control the manufacture of Boomfood — 
Herakleophorbia, I should say — we might ” 

He paused, and Redwood, with a certain private 
discomfort, pretended that he did not see any sort of 
interrogation. 

Outside the apartments of Redwood and Bensing- 
ton, Winkles, in spite of the incompleteness of his in- 
structions, became a leading authority upon Boom- 
food. He wrote letters defending its use; he made 
notes and articles explaining its possibilities ; he 
jumped up irrelevantly at the meetings of the scien- 
tific and medical associations to talk about it; he iden- 
tified himself with it. He published a pamphlet 
called “The Truth about Boomfood,” in which he 
minimised the whole of the Hickleybrow affair al- 
most to nothing. He said that it was absurd to say 
Boomfood would make people thirty-seven feet high. 
That was “obviously exaggerated.” It would make 
them Bigger, of course, but that was all. . . . 

Within that intimate circle of two it was chiefly 
evident that Winkles was extremely anxious to help 
in the making of Herakleophorbia, help in correcting 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


“7 

any proofs there might be of any paper there might 
be in preparation upon the subject, do anything in- 
deed that might lead up to his participation in the de- 
tails of the making of Herakleophorbia. He was 
continually telling them both that he felt it was a 
Big Thing, that it had big possibilities. If only they 
were — “safeguarded in some way.” And at last one 
day he asked outright to be told just how it was 
made. 

“I’ve been thinking over what you said,” said 
Redwood. 

“Well?” said Winkles, brightly. 

“It’s the sort of knowledge that could easily be 
subject to grave abuse,” said Redwood. 

“But I don’t see how that applies,” said Winkles. 

“It does,” said Redwood. 

Winkles thought it over for a day or so. Then 
he came to Redwood and said that he doubted if he 
ought to give powders about which he knew nothing 
to Redwood’s little boy; it seemed to him it was un- 
commonly like taking responsibility in the dark. That 
made Redwood thoughtful. 

“You’ve seen that the Society for the Total Sup- 
pression of Boomfood claims to have several thou- 
sand members,” said Winkles, changing the subject. 

“They’ve drafted a bill,” said Winkles. “They’ve 
got young Caterham to take it up — readily enough. 
They’re in earnest. They’re forming local commit- 
tees to influence candidates. They want to make it 
penal to prepare and store Herakleophorbia without 


n8 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk.i 


special license, and felony — matter of imprisonment 
without option — to administer Boomfood — that’s 
what they call it, you know — to any person under 
one-and-twenty. But there’s collateral societies, you 
know. All sorts of people. The Society for the 
Preservation of Ancient Statures is going to have 
Mr. Frederick Harrison on the council, they say. 
You know he’s written an essay about it; says it is 
vulgar, and entirely inharmonious with that Revela- 
tion of Humanity that is found in the teachings of 
Comte. It is the sort of thing the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury couldn’t have produced even in its worst mo- 
ments. The idea of the Food never entered the head 
of Comte — which shows how wicked it really is. No 
one, he says, who really understood Comte. . . 

“But you don’t mean to say — ” said Redwood, 
alarmed out of his disdain for Winkles. 

“They’ll not do all that,” said Winkles. “But 
public opinion is public opinion, and votes are votes. 
Everybody can see you are up to a disturbing thing. 
And the human instinct is all against disturbance, 
you know. Nobody seems to believe Caterham’s 
idea of people thirty-seven feet high, who won’t be 
able to get inside a church, or a meeting-house, or 
any social or human institution. But for all that 
they’re not so easy in their minds about it. They 
see there’s something, something more than a com- 
mon discovery ” 

“There is,” said Redwood, “in every discovery.” 

“Anyhow, they’re getting — restive. Caterham 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


”9 

keeps harping on what may happen if it gets loose 
again. I say over and over again it won’t and it 
can’t. But — there it is!” 

And he bounced about the room for a little while 
as if he meant to reopen the topic of the secret, and 
then thought better of it and went. 

The two scientific men looked at one another. For 
a space only their eyes spoke. 

“If the worst comes to the worst,” said Redwood 
at last, in a strenuously calm voice, “I shall give the 
Food to my little Teddy with my own hands.” 

Ill 

It was only a few days after this that Redwood 
opened his paper to find that the Prime Minister had 
promised a Royal Commission on Boomfood. This 
sent him newspaper in hand, round to Bensington’s 
flat. 

“Winkles, I believe, is making mischief for the 
stuff. He plays into the hands of Caterham. He 
keeps on talking about it, and what it is going to do, 
and alarming people. If he goes on, I really believe 
’ he’ll hamper our inquiries. Even as it is — with this 
trouble about my little boy ” 

Bensington wished Winkles wouldn’t. 

“Do you notice how he has dropped into the way 
of calling it Boomfood?” 

“I don’t like that name,” said Bensington, with a 
glance over his glasses. 


i2o THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk.i 


“It is just so exactly what it is — to Winkles.” 

“Why does he keep on about it? It isn’t his!” 

“It’s something called Booming,” said Red- 
wood. 1 don’t understand. If it isn’t his, every- 
body is getting to think it is. Not that that mat- 
ters.” 

“In the event of this ignorant, this ridiculous agi- 
tation becoming — Serious,” began Bensington. 

“My little boy can’t get on without the stuff,” said 
Redwood. “I don’t see how I can help myself now. 
If the worst comes to the worst ” 

A slight bouncing noise proclaimed the presence of 
Winkles. He became visible in the middle of the 
room rubbing his hands together. 

“I wish you’d knock,” said Bensington, looking 
vicious over the gold rims. 

Winkles was apologetic. Then he turned to Red- 
wood. “I’m glad to find you here,” he began; “the 
fact is ” 

“Have you seen about this Royal Commission?” 
interrupted Redwood. 

“Yes,” said Winkles, thrown out. “Yes.” 

“What do you think of it?” 

“Excellent thing,” said Winkles. “Bound to stop 
most of this clamour. Ventilate the whole affair. 
Shut up Caterham. But that’s not what I came 
round for, Redwood. The fact is ” 

“I don’t like this Royal Commission,” said Ben- 
sington. 

“I can assure you it will be all right. I may say 


ch.iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


iai 


— I don’t think it’s a breach of confidence — that very 
possibly I may have a place on the commission ” 

“Oom,” said Redwood, looking into the fire. 

“I can put the whole thing right. I can make it 
perfectly clear, first, that the stuff is controllable, and, 
secondly, that nothing short of a miracle is needed 
before anything like that catastrophe at Hickleybrow 
can possibly happen again. That is just what is 
wanted, an authoritative assurance. Of course, I 
could speak with more confidence if I knew — 
But that’s quite by the way. And just at present 
there’s something else, another little matter, upon 
which I’m wanting to consult you. Ahem. The fact 
is — Well — I happen to be in a slight difficulty, 
and you can help me out.” 

Redwood raised his eyebrows and was secretly 
glad. 

‘‘The matter is — highly confidential.” 

“Go on,” said Redwood. “Don’t worry about 
that.” 

“I have recently been entrusted with a child — 
the child of — of an Exalted Personage.” 

Winkles coughed. 

“You’re getting on,” said Redwood. 

“I must confess it’s largely your powders — and 
the reputation of my success with your little boy — 
There is, I cannot disguise, a strong feeling against 
its use. And yet I find that among the more intelli- 
gent — One must go quietly in these things, you 
know — little by little. Still, in the case of Her 


122 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


Serene High — I mean this new little patient of mine. 
As a matter of fact — the suggestion came from the 
parent. Or I should never ” 

He struck Redwod as being embarrassed. 

“I thought you had a doubt of the advisability of 
using these powders,” said Redwood. 

“Merely a passing doubt.” 

“You don’t propose to discontinue ” 

“In the case of your little boy? Certainly not!” 

“So far as I can see, it would be murder.” 

“I wouldn’t do it for the world.” 

“You shall have the powders,” said Redwood. 

“I suppose you couldn’t ” 

“No fear,” said Redwood. “There isn’t a recipe. 
It’s no good, Winkles, if you’ll pardon my frankness. 
I’ll make you the powders myself.” 

“Just as well, perhaps,” said Winkles, after a mo- 
mentary hard stare at Redwood, “just as well.” And 
then: “I can assure you I really don’t mind in the 
least.” 

IV 

When Winkles had gone Bensington came and 
stood on the hearth-rug and looked down at Red- 
wood. 

“Her Serene Highness!” he remarked. 

“Her Serene Highness!” said Redwood. 

“It’s the Princess of Weser Dreiburg!” 

“No further than a third cousin.” 

“Redwood,” said Bensington; “it’s a curious thing 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


12 3 

to say, I know, but — do you think Winkles under- 
stands?” 

“What?” 

“Just what it is we have made. 

“Does he really understand,” said Bensington, 
dropping his voice and keeping his eye doorward, 
“that in the Family — the Family of his new pa- 
tient ” 

“Go on,” said Redwood. 

“Who have always been if anything a little under 
— under ” 

“The Average?” 

“Yes. And so very tactfully undistinguished in 
any way, he is going to produce a royal personage — 
an outside royal personage — of that size. You know, 
Redwood, I’m not sure whether there is not some- 
thing almost — treasonable. . . .” 

He transferred his eyes from the door to Red- 
wood. 

Redwood flung a momentary gesture — index fin- 
ger erect — at the fire. “By Jove!” he said, “he 
doesn’t know ! 

“That man,” said Redwood, “doesn’t know any- 
thing. That was his most exasperating quality as a 
student. Nothing. He passed all his examinations, 
he had all his facts — and he had just as much knowl- 
edge — as a rotating bookshelf containing the Times 
Encyclopedia. And he doesn’t know anything now. 
He’s Winkles and incapable of really assimilating 
anything not immediately and directly related to 


124 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk.i 

his superficial self. He is utterly void of imagination 
and, as a consequence, incapable of knowledge. No 
one could possibly pass so many examinations and be 
so well dressed, so well done, and so successful as a 
doctor without that precise incapacity. That’s it. 
And in spite of all he’s seen and heard and been told, 
there he is — he has no idea whatever of what he has 
set going. He has got a Boom on, he’s working it 
well on Boomfood, and some one has let him in to 
this new Royal Baby — and that’s Boomier than ever! 
And the fact that Weser Dreiburg will presently have 
to face the gigantic problem of a thirty-odd-foot 
Princess not only hasn’t entered his head, but couldn’t 
— it couldn’t!” 

“There’ll be a fearful row,” said Bensington. 

“In a year or so.” 

“So soon as they really see she is going on grow- 
ing.” 

“Unless after their fashion — they hush it up.” 

“It’s a lot to hush up.” 

“Rather!” 

“I wonder what they’ll do?” 

“They never do anything — Royal tact.” 

“They’re bound to do something.” 

“Perhaps she will.” 

“OLord! Yes.” 

“They’ll suppress her. Such things have been 
known.” 

Redwood burst into desperate laughter. “The re- 
dundant royalty — the bouncing babe in the Iron 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


125 

Mask!” he said. “They’ll have to put her in the tall- 
est tower of the old Weser Dreiburg castle and make 
holes in the ceilings as she grows from floor to floor ! 

. Well, I’m in the very same pickle. And 
Cossar and his three boys. And — Well, well.” 

“There’ll be a fearful row,” Bensington repeated, 
not joining in the laughter. “A fearful row. 

“I suppose,” he argued, “you’ve really thought it 
out thoroughly,- Redwood. You’re quite sure it 
wouldn’t be wiser to warn Winkles, wean your little 
boy gradually and — rely upon the Theoretical Tri- 
umph?” 

“I wish to goodness you’d spend half an hour in 
my nursery when the Food’s a little late,” said Red- 
wood, with a note of exasperation in his voice, “then 
you wouldn’t talk like that, Bensington. Besides 
— Fancy warning Winkles ! . . . No ! The 

tide of this thing has caught us unawares, and 
whether we’re frightened or whether we’re not — 
we’ve got to swim!” 

“I suppose we have,” said Bensington, staring at 
his toes. “Yes. We’ve got to swim. And your boy 
will have to swim, and Cossar’s boys — he’s given it 
to all three of them. Nothing partial about Cossar 
— all or nothing ! And Her Serene Highness. And 
everything. We are going on making the Food. 
Cossar also. We’re only just in the dawn of the be- 
ginning, Redwood. It’s evident all sorts of things 
are to follow. Monstrous great things. But I can’t 
imagine them, Redwood. Except ” 


126 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


He scanned his finger nails. He looked up at Red- 
wood with eyes bland through his glasses. 

“I’ve half a mind,” he adventured, “that Cater- 
ham is right. At times. It’s going to destroy the Pro- 
portions of Things. It’s going to dislocate — What 
isn’t it going to dislocate?” 

“Whatever it dislocates,” said Redwood, “my lit- 
tle boy must have the Food.” 

They heard some one falling rapidly upstairs. 
Then Cossar put his head into the flat. “Hul- 
lo!” he said at their expressions, and entering, 
“Well?” 

They told him about the Princess. 

“ Difficult question!” he remarked. “Not a bit of 
it. She'll grow. Your boy’ll grow. All the others 
you give it to ’ll grow. Everything. Like anything. 
What’s difficult about that? That’s all right. A 
child could tell you that. Where’s the bother?” 

They tried to make it clear to him. 

“Not go on with it!” he shrieked. “But — ! You 
can’t help yourselves now. It’s what you’re for. It’s 
what Winkles is for. It’s all right. Often won- 
dered what Winkles was for. Now it’s obvious. 
What’s the trouble? 

“ Disturbance ? Obviously. Upset things? Up- 
set everything. Finally — upset every human con- 
cern. Plain as a pikestaff. They’re going to try and 
stop it, but they’re too late. It’s their way to be too 
late. You go on and start as much of it as you can. 
Thank God he has a use for you !” 


ch.iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


127 

“But the conflict!” said Bensington, “the stress! 
I don’t know if you have imagined ” 

“You ought to have been some sort of little vege- 
table, Bensington,” said Cossar, “that’s what you 
ought to have been. Something growing over a 
rockery. Here you are, fearfully and wonderfully 
made, and all you think you’re made for is just to 
sit about and take your vittles. D’you think this 
world was made for old women to mop about in? 
Well, anyhow, you can’t help yourselves now, you’ve 
got to go on.” 

“I suppose we must,” said Redwood. “Slow- 
ly ” 

“No !” said Cossar, in a huge shout. “No ! Make 
as much as you can and as soon as you can. Spread 
it about!” 

He was inspired to a stroke of wit. He parodied 
one of Redwood’s curves with a vast upward sweep 
of his arm. 

“Redwood!” he said, to point the allusion, “make 


There is, it seems, an upward limit to the pride of 
maternity, and this in the case of Mrs. Redwood was 
reached when her offspring completed his sixth 
month of terrestrial existence, broke down his high- 
class bassinet-perambulator and was brought home, 
bawling, in the milk-truck. Young Redwood at that 
time weighed fifty-nine and a half pounds, measured 


128 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk.i 


forty-eight inches in height, and gripped about sixty 
pounds. He was carried upstairs to the nursery by 
the cook and housemaid. After that discovery was 
only a question of days. One afternoon Redwood 
came home from his laboratory to find his unfortu- 
nate wife deep in the fascinating pages of The 
Mighty Atom, and at the sight of him, she put the 
book aside and ran violently forward and burst into 
tears on his shoulder. 

“Tell me what you have done to him,” she wailed. 
“Tell me what you have done.” 

Redwood took her hand and led her to the sofa, 
while he tried to think of a satisfactory line of de- 
fence. 

“It’s all right, my dear,” he said; “it’s all right. 
You’re only a little overwrought. It’s that cheap 
perambulator. I’ve arranged for a bath-chair man 
to come round with something stouter to-mor- 


Mrs. Redwood looked at him tearfully over the 
top of her handkerchief. 

“A baby in a bath-chair?” she sobbed. 

“Well, why not?” 

“It’s like a cripple.” 

“It’s like a young giant, my dear, and you’ve no 
cause to be ashamed of him.” 

“You’ve done something to him, Dandy,” she 
said. “I can see it in your face.” 

“Well, it hasn’t stopped his growth, anyhow,” 
said Redwood heartlessly. 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


129 


“I knew,” said Mrs. Redwood, and clenched her 
pocket-handkerchief ball fashion in one hand. She 
looked at him with a sudden change to severity. 
“What have you done to our child, Dandy?” 

“What’s wrong with him?” 

“He’s so big. He’s a monster.” 

“Nonsense. He’s as straight and clean a baby as 
ever a woman had. What’s wrong with him?” 

“Look at his size.” 

“That’s all right. Look at the puny little brutes 
about us ! He’s the finest baby ” 

“He’s too fine,” said Mrs. Redwood. 

“It won’t go on,” said Redwood reassuringly; 
“it’s just a start he’s taken.” 

But he knew perfectly well it would go on. And it 
did. By the time this baby was twelve months old 
he tottered just one inch under five feet high and 
scaled eight stone three; he was as big in fact as a 
San Pietro in V aticano cherub, and his affectionate 
clutch at the hair and features of visitors became the 
talk of West Kensington. They had an invalid’s 
chair to carry him up and down to his nursery, and 
his special nurse, a muscular young person just out 
of training, used to take him for his airings in a Pan- 
hard 8 h.p. hill-climbing perambulator specially made 
to meet his requirements. It was lucky in every way 
that Redwood had his expert witness connection in 
addition to his professorship. 

When one got over the shock of little Redwood’s 
enormous size, he was, I am told by people who used 


1 3 ° 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


to see him almost daily teufteufing slowly about Hyde 
Park, a singularly bright and pretty baby. He rarely 
cried or needed a comforter. Commonly he clutched 
a big rattle, and sometimes he went along hailing the 
bus-drivers and policemen along the road outside the 
railings as “Dadda!” and “Babba!” in a sociable 
democratic way. 

“There goes that there great Boomfood baby,” 
the bus-driver used to say. 

“Looks ’ealthy,” the forward passenger would re- 
mark. 

“Bottle fed,” the bus-driver would explain. “They 
say it ’olds a gallon and ’ad to be specially made for 
’im.” 

“Very ’ealthy child any’ow,” the forward passen- 
ger would conclude. 

When Mrs. Redwood realised that his growth was 
indeed going on indefinitely and logically — and this 
she really did for the first time when the motor-per- 
ambulator arrived — she gave way to a passion of 
grief. She declared she never wished to enter her 
nursery again, wished she was dead, wished the child 
was dead, wished everybody was dead, wished she 
had never married Redwood, wished no one ever 
married anybody, Ajaxed a little, and retired to her 
own room, where she lived almost exclusively on 
chicken broth for three days. When Redwood came 
to remonstrate with her, she banged pillows about 
and wept and tangled her hair. 

“He’s all right,” said Redwood. “He’s all the 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


better for being big. You wouldn’t like him smaller 
than other people’s children.” 

“I want him to be like other children, neither 
smaller nor bigger. I wanted him to be a nice little 
boy, just as Georgina Phyllis is a nice little girl, and 
I wanted to bring him up nicely in a nice way, and 
here he is” — and the unfortunate woman’s voice 
broke — “wearing number four grown-up shoes and 
being wheeled about by — booboo! — Petroleum! 

“I can never love him,” she wailed, “never! He’s 
too much for me ! I can never be a mother to him, 
such as I meant to be !” 

But at last they contrived to get her into the nur- 
sery, and there was Edward Monson Redwood 
(“Pantagruel” was only a later nickname) swinging 
in a specially strengthened rocking-chair and smiling 
and talking “goo” and “wow.” And the heart of 
Mrs. Redwood warmed again to her child, and she 
went and held him in her arms and wept. 

“They’ve done something to you,” she sobbed, 
“and you’ll grow and grow, dear, but whatever I 
can do to bring you up nice I’ll do for you whatever 
your father may say.” 

And Redwood, who had helped bring her to the 
door, went down the passage much relieved. 

(Eh! but it’s a base job this being a man — with 
women as they are!) 


132 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 


VI 

Before the year was out there were, in addition to 
Redwood’s pioneer vehicle, quite a number of motor- 
perambulators to be seen in the west of London. I 
am told there were as many as eleven ; but the most 
careful inquiries yield trustworthy evidence of only 
six within the Metropolitan area at that time. It 
would seem the stuff acted differently upon different 
types of constitution. At first Herakleophorbia was 
not adapted to injection, and there can be no doubt 
that quite a considerable proportion of human beings 
are incapable of absorbing this substance in the nor- 
mal course of digestion. It was given, for example, 
to Winkles’ youngest boy ; but he seems to have been 
as incapable of growth as, if Redwood was right, his 
father was incapable of knowledge. Others again, ac- 
cording to the Society for the Total Suppression of 
Boomfood, became in some inexplicable way cor- 
rupted by it, and perished at the onset of infantile 
disorders. The Cossar boys took to it with amazing 
avidity. 

Of course a thing of this kind never comes with 
absolute simplicity of application into the life of 
man ; growth in particular is a complex thing, and all 
generalisations must needs be a little inaccurate. But 
the general law of the Food would seem to be this, 
that when it could be taken into the system in any 
way it stimulated it in very nearly the same degree in 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


l 33 


all cases. It increased the amount of growth from 
six to seven times, and it did not go beyond that what- 
ever amount of the Food in excess was taken. Excess 
of Herakleophorbia indeed beyond the necessary 
minimum led, it was found, to morbid disturbances of 
nutrition, to cancer and tumours, ossifications and the 
like. And once growth upon the large scale had be- 
gun it was soon evident that it could only continue 
upon that scale and that the continuous administra- 
tion of Herakleophorbia in small but sufficient doses 
was imperative. 

If it was discontinued while growth was still go- 
ing on, there was first a vague restlessness and dis- 
tress, then a period of voracity — as in the case of the 
young rats at Hankey — and then the growing creat- 
ure had a sort of exaggerated anaemia and sickened 
and died. Plants suffered in a similar way. This, 
however, applied only to the growth period. So 
soon as adolescence was attained — in plants this was 
represented by the formation of the first flower-buds 
— the need and appetite for Herakleophorbia dimin- 
ished, and so soon as the plant or animal was fully 
< adult, it became altogether independent of any fur- 
ther supply of the food. It was, as it were, completely 
established on the new scale. It was so completely 
established on the new scale that, as the thistles about 
Hickleybrow and the grass of the down side already 
demonstrated, its seed produced giant offspring after 
its kind. 

And presently little Redwood, pioneer of the new 


i 3 4 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

race, first child of all who ate the food, was crawling 
about his nursery, smashing furniture, biting like a 
horse, pinching like a vice, and bawling gigantic baby 
talk at his “Nanny” and “Mammy” and the rather 
scared and awe-stricken “Daddy,” who had set this 
mischief going. 

The child was born with good intentions. “Padda 
be good, be good,” he used to say as the breakables 
flew before him. “Padda” was his rendering of Pan- 
tagruel, the nickname Redwood imposed on him. 
And Cossar, disregarding certain Ancient Lights that 
presently led to trouble, did, after a conflict with the 
local building regulations, get building on a vacant 
piece of ground adjacent to Redwood’s home, a com- 
fortable well-lit playroom, schoolroom, and nursery 
for their four boys, sixty feet square about this room 
was, and forty feet high. 

Redwood fell in love with that great nursery as he 
and Cossar built it, and his interest in curves faded, 
as he had never dreamt it could fade, before the press- 
ing needs of his son. “There is much,” he said, “in 
fitting a nursery. Much. 

“The walls, the things in it, they will all speak to 
this new mind of ours, a little more, a little less elo- 
quently, and teach it, or fail to teach it a thousand 
things.” 

“Obviously,” said Cossar, reaching hastily for his 
hat. 

They worked together harmoniously, but Red- 
wood supplied most of the educational theory re- 
quired. . . . 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


135 

They had the walls and woodwork painted with a 
cheerful vigour; for the most part a slightly warmed 
white prevailed, but there were bands of bright clean 
colour to enforce the simple lines of construction. 
“Clean colours we must have,” said Redwood, and 
in one place had a neat horizontal band of squares, 
in which crimson and purple, orange and lemon, blues 
and greens, in many hues and many shades, did them- 
selves honour. These squares the giant children 
should arrange and rearrange to their pleasure. 
“Decorations must follow,” said Redwood; “let 
them first get the range of all the tints and then this 
may go away. There is no reason why one should 
bias them in favour of any particular colour or de- 
sign.” 

Then, “The place must be full of interest,” said 
Redwood. “Interest is food for a child and blank- 
ness torture and starvation. He must have pictures 
galore.” There were no pictures hung about the 
room for any permanent service, however, but blank 
frames were provided into which new pictures would 
come and pass thence into a portfolio so soon as their 
fresh interest had passed. There was one window 
that looked down the length of a street, and in addi- 
tion, for an added interest, Redwood had contrived 
above the roof of the nursery a camera obscura that 
watched the Kensington High Street and not a little 
of the Gardens. 

In one corner that most worthy implement, an Aba- 
cus, four feet square, a specially strengthened piece of 
ironmongery with rounded corners, awaited the 


1 36 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. 1 

young giants’ incipient computations. There were few 
woolly lambs and such-like idols, but instead Cossar, 
without explanation, had brought one day in three 
four-wheelers a great number of toys (all just too 
big for the coming children to swallow) that could 
be piled up, arranged in rows, rolled about, bitten, 
made to flap and rattle, smacked together, felt over, 
pulled out, opened, closed and mauled and experi- 
mented with to an interminable extent. There were 
many bricks of wood in diverse colours, oblong and 
cuboid, bricks of polished china, bricks of transparent 
glass and bricks of india-rubber; there were slabs and 
slates; there were cones, truncated cones and cylin- 
ders ; there were oblate and prolate spheroids, balls 
of varied substances, solid and hollow, many boxes of 
diverse size and shape, with hinged lids and screw 
lids and fitting lids, and one or two to catch and lock; 
there were bands of elastic and leather, and a number 
of rough and sturdy little objects of a size together 
that could stand up steadily and suggest the shape of 
a man. “Give ’em these,” said Cossar. “One at a 
time.” 

These things Redwood arranged in a locker in one 
corner. Along one side of the room, at a convenient 
height for a six or eight foot child, there was a black- 
board, on which the youngsters might flourish in 
white and coloured chalk, and near by a sort of draw- 
ing block, from which sheet after sheet might be torn, 
and on which they could draw in charcoal, and a little 
desk there was, furnished with great carpenter’s pen- 


ch.iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


i37 


cils of varying hardness and a copious supply of 
paper, on which the boys might first scribble and then 
draw more neatly. And moreover Redwood gave 
orders, so far ahead did his imagination go, for spe- 
cially large tubes of liquid paint and boxes of pastels 
against the time when they should be needed. He 
laid in a cask or so of plasticine and modelling clay. 
“At first he and his tutor shall model together,” he 
said, “and when he is more skilful he shall copy casts 
and perhaps animals. And that reminds me, I must 
also have made for him a box of tools ! 

“Then books. I shall have to look out a lot of 
books to put in his way, and they’ll have to be big 
type. Now what sort of books will he need? There 
is his imagination to be fed. That, after all, is the 
crown of every education. The crown — as sound 
habits of mind and conduct are the throne. No 
imagination at all is brutality; a base imagination is 
lust and cowardice; but a noble imagination is God 
walking the earth again. He must dream, too, of a 
dainty fairy-land and of all the quaint little things 
of life, in due time. But he must feed chiefly on the 
splendid real; he shall have stories of travel through 
all the world, travels and adventures and how the 
world was won ; he shall have stories of beasts, great 
books splendidly and clearly done of animals and 
birds and plants and creeping things, great books 
about the deeps of the sky and the mystery of the sea ; 
he shall have histories and maps of all the empires 
the world has seen, pictures and stories of all the 


138 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

tribes and habits and customs of men. And he must 
have books and pictures to quicken his sense of 
beauty, subtle Japanese pictures to make him love 
the subtler beauties of bird and tendril and falling 
flower, and western pictures too, pictures of gracious 
men and women, sweet groupings, and broad views 
of land and sea. He shall have books on the build- 
ing of houses and palaces; he shall plan rooms and 
invent cities 

“I think I must give him a little theatre. 

“Then there is music!” 

Redwood thought that over and decided that his 
son might best begin with a very pure-sounding har- 
monicon of one octave, to which afterwards there 
could be an extension. “He shall play with this first, 
sing to it and give names to the notes,” said Red- 
wood, “and afterwards ?” 

He stared up at the window-sill overhead and 
measured the size of the room with his eye. 

“They’ll have to build his piano in here,” he said. 
“Bring it in in pieces.” 

He hovered about amidst his preparations, a pen- 
sive dark little figure. If you could have seen him 
there he would have looked to you like a ten-inch 
man amidst common nursery things. A great rug — 
indeed it was a Turkey carpet — four hundred square 
feet of it, upon which young Redwood was soon to 
crawl, stretched to the grill-guarded electric radiator 
that was to warm the whole place. A man from 
Cossar’s hung amidst scaffolding overhead, fixing 


ch. iv THE GIANT CHILDREN 


I 39 

the great frame that was to hold the transitory pic- 
tures. A blotting-paper book for plant specimens as 
big as a house door leant against the wall, and from 
it projected a gigantic stalk, a leaf edge or so and one 
flower of chickweed, all of that gigantic size that was 
soon to make Urshot famous throughout the botani- 
cal world. 

A sort of incredulity came to Redwood as he stood 
among these things. 

“If it really is going on — ” said Redwood, star- 
ing up from the remote ceiling. 

From far away came a sound like the bellowing of 
a Mafficking bull, almost as if in answer. 

“It’s going on all right,” said Redwood. “Evi- 
dently.” 

There followed resounding blows upon a table, 
followed by a vast crowing shout, “Gooloo! Boo- 
zoo! Bzz . . .” 

“The best thing I can do,” said Redwood, follow- 
ing out some divergent line of thought, “is to teach 
him myself.” 

That beating became more insistent. For a mo- 
ment it seemed to Redwood that it caught the rhythm 
of an engine’s throbbing, the engine he could have 
imagined of some great train of events that bore 
down upon him. Then a descendant flight of sharper 
beats broke up that effect, and were repeated. 

“Come in,” he cried, perceiving that some one 
rapped, and the door that was big enough for a ca- 
thedral opened slowly a little way. The new winch 


i 4 o THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

ceased to creak, and Bensington appeared in the 
crack, gleaming benevolently under his protruded 
baldness and over his glasses. 

“I’ve ventured round to see ” he whispered in a 
confidentially furtive manner. 

“Come in,” said Redwood, and he did, shutting 
the door behind him. 

He walked forward, hands behind his back, ad- 
vanced a few steps, and peered up with a birdlike 
movement at the dimensions about him. He rubbed 
his chin thoughtfully. 

“Every time I come in,” he said, with a subdued 
note in his voice, “it strikes me as — ‘Big.* ” 

“Yes,” said Redwood, surveying it all again also, 
as if in an endeavour to keep hold of the visible im- 
pression. “Yes. They’re going to be big, too, you 
know.” 

“I know,” said Bensington, with a note that was 
nearly awe. “ Very big.” 

They looked at one another, almost, as it were, 
apprehensively. 

“Very big indeed,” said Bensington, stroking the 
bridge of his nose, and with one eye that watched 
Redwood doubtfully for a confirmatory expression. 
“All of them, you know — fearfully Big. I don’t 
seem able to imagine — even with this — just how big 
they’re all going to be.” 


CHAPTER THE FIFTH 


THE MINIMIFICENCE OF MR. BENSINGTON 

I 

It was while the Royal Commission on Boomfood 
was preparing its report that Herakleophorbia really 
began to demonstrate its capacity for leakage. And 
the earliness of this second outbreak was the more 
unfortunate, from the point of view of Cossar at any 
rate, since the draft report still in existence shows 
that the Commission had, under the tutelage of that 
most able member, Doctor Stephen Winkles (F.R.S., 
M.D., F.R.C.P., D.Sc., J.P., D.L., etc.), already 
quite made up its mind that accidental leakages were 
impossible, and was prepared to recommend that to 
entrust the preparation of Boomfood to a qualified 
committee (Winkles chiefly), with an entire control 
over its sale, was quite enough to satisfy all reason- 
able objections to its free diffusion. This committee 
was to have an absolute monopoly. And it is, no 
doubt, to be considered as a part of the irony of life 
that the first and most alarming of this second series 
of leakages occurred within fifty yards of a little cot- 
tage at Keston occupied during the summer months 
by Doctor Winkles. 


I 4 2 the DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

There can be little doubt now that Redwood’s re- 
fusal to acquaint Winkles with the composition of 
Herakleophorbia IV. had aroused in that gentleman 
a novel and intense desire towards analytical chemis- 
try. He was not a very expert manipulator, and for 
that reason probably he saw fit to do his work not in 
the excellently equipped laboratories that were at his 
disposal in London, but without consulting any one, 
and almost with an air of secrecy, in a rough little 
garden laboratory at the Keston establishment. He 
does not seem to have shown either very great energy 
or very great ability in this quest ; indeed one gathers 
he dropped the inquiry after working at it intermit- 
tently for about a month. 

This garden laboratory, in which the work was 
done, was very roughly equipped, supplied by a stand- 
pipe tap with water, and draining into a pipe that 
ran down into a swampy rush-bordered pool under 
an alder tree in a secluded corner of the common just 
outside the garden hedge. The pipe was cracked, 
and the residuum of the Food of the Gods escaped 
through the crack into a little puddle amidst clumps 
of rushes, just in time for the spring awakening. 

Everything was astir with life in that scummy little 
corner. There was frog spawn adrift, tremulous with 
tadpoles just bursting their gelatinous envelopes; 
there were little pond snails creeping out into life, 
and under the green skin of the rush stems the larvae 
of a big Water Beetle were struggling out of their 
egg cases. I doubt if the reader knows the larva of 


CH. V 


MR. BENSINGTON 


H 3 


the beetle called (I know not why) Dytiscus. It is a 
jointed, queer-looking thing, very muscular and sud- 
den in its movements, and given to swimming head 
downward with its tail out of water; the length of a 
man’s top thumb joint it is, and more — two inches, 
that is for those who have not eaten the Food — and 
it has two sharp jaws that meet in front of its head, 
tubular jaws with sharp points, through which its 
habit is to suck its victim’s blood. 

The first things to get at the drifting grains of the 
Food were the little tadpoles and the little water 
snails ; the little wriggling tadpoles in particular, once 
they had the taste of it, took to it with zest. But 
scarcely did one of them begin to grow into a con- 
spicuous position in that little tadpole world and try 
a smaller brother or so as an aid to a vegetarian diet- 
ary, when nip ! one of the Beetle larvae had its curved 
bloodsucking prongs gripping into his heart, and 
with that red stream went Herakleophorbia IV., in 
a state of solution, into the being of a new client. 
The only thing that had a chance with these mon- 
sters to get any share of the Food were the rushes 
and slimy green scum in the water and the seedling 
weeds in the mud at the bottom. A clean up of the 
study presently washed a fresh spate of the Food 
into the puddle, overflowed it, and carried all this 
sinister expansion of the struggle for life into the ad- 
jacent pool under the roots of the alder. . 

The first person to discover what was going on 
was a Mr. Lukey Carrington, a special science 


i 4 4 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

teacher under the London Education Board, and, in 
his leisure, a specialist in fresh-water algae, and he is 
certainly not to be envied his discovery. He had 
come down to Keston Common for the day to fill a 
number of specimen tubes for subsequent examina- 
tion, and he came, with a dozen or so of corked tubes 
clanking faintly in his pocket, over the sandy crest 
and down towards the pool, spiked walking stick in 
hand. A garden lad standing on the top of the 
kitchen steps clipping Doctor Winkles’ hedge saw 
him in this unfrequented corner, and found him and 
his occupation sufficiently inexplicable and interesting 
to watch him pretty closely. 

He saw Mr. Carrington stoop down by the side 
of the pool, with his hand against the old alder 
stem, and peer into the water, but of course he could 
not appreciate the surprise and pleasure with which 
Mr. Carrington beheld the big unfamiliar-looking 
blobs and threads of the algal scum at the bottom. 
There were no tadpoles visible — they had all been 
killed by that time — and it would seem Mr. Carring- 
ton saw nothing at all unusual except the excessive 
vegetation. He bared his arm to the elbow, leant 
forward, and dipped deep in pursuit of a specimen. 
His seeking hand went down. Instantly there flashed 
out of the cool shadow under the tree roots some- 
thing — 

Flash ! It had buried its fangs deep into his arm 
— a bizarre shape it was, a foot long and more, 
brown and jointed like a scorpion. 


CH. V 


MR. BENSINGTON 


*45 


Its ugly apparition, and the sharp amazing pain- 
fulness of its bite, was too much for Mr. Carring- 
ton’s equilibrium. He felt himself going and yelled 
aloud. Over he toppled, face foremost, splash ! into 
the pool. 

The boy saw him vanish, and heard the splashing 
of his struggle in the water. The unfortunate man 
emerged again into the boy’s field of vision, hatless 
and streaming with water, and screaming! 

Never before had the boy heard screams from a 
man. 

This astonishing stranger appeared to be tearing 
at something on the side of his face. There appeared 
streaks of blood there. He flung out his arms as if in 
despair, leapt in the air like a frantic creature, ran 
violently ten or twelve yards and then fell and rolled 
on the ground and over and out of sight of the boy. 

The lad was down the steps and through the hedge 
in a trice — happily with the garden shears still in 
hand. As he came crashing through the gorse bushes, 
he says he was half minded to turn back, fearing he 
had to deal with a lunatic, but the possession of the 
shears reassured him. “I could ’ave jabbed his eyes,” 
he explained, “anyhow.” Directly Mr. Carrington 
caught sight of him, his demeanour became at once 
that of a sane but desperate man. He struggled to 
his feet, stumbled, stood up and came to meet the 
boy. 

“Look!” he cried, “I can’t get ’em off!” 

And with a qualm of horror the boy saw that at- 


1 46 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

tached to Mr. Carrington’s cheek, to his bare arm, 
and to his thigh, and lashing furiously with their lithe 
brown muscular bodies, were three of these horrible 
larvae, their great jaws buried deep in his flesh and 
sucking for dear life. They had the grip of bull- 
dogs, and Mr. Carrington’s efforts to detach the mon- 
ster from his face had only served to lacerate the 
flesh to which it had attached itself, and streak face 
and neck and coat with living scarlet. 

“I’ll cut ’im,” cried the boy; “ ’old on, Sir.” 

And with the zest of his age in such proceedings, 
he severed one by one the heads from the bodies of 
Mr. Carrington’s assailants. “Yup,” said the boy 
with a wincing face as each one fell before him. Even 
then, so tough and determined was their grip that the 
severed heads remained for a space, still fiercely bit- 
ing home and still sucking, with the blood streaming 
out of their necks behind. But the boy stopped that 
with a few more slashes of his scissors — in one of 
which Mr. Carrington was implicated. 

“I couldn’t get ’em off!” repeated Carrington, and 
stood for a space, swaying and bleeding profusely. 
He dabbed feeble hands at his injuries and examined 
the result upon his palms. Then he gave way at the 
knees and fell headlong in a dead faint at the boy’s 
feet, between the still leaping bodies of his defeated 
foes. Very luckily it didn’t occur to the boy to splash 
water on his face — for there were still more of these 
horrors under the alder roots — and instead he passed 
back by the pond and went into the garden with the 


CH. V 


MR. BENSINGTON 


i47 


intention of calling assistance. And there he met 
the gardener coachman and told him of the whole 
affair. 

When they got back to Mr. Carrington he was sit- 
ting up, dazed and weak, but able to warn them 
against the danger in the pool. 


II 

Such were the circumstances by which the world 
had its first notification that the Food was loose again. 
In another week Keston Common was in full opera- 
tion as what naturalists call a centre of distribution. 
This time there were no wasps or rats, no earwigs and 
no nettles, but there were at least three water-spiders, 
several dragon-fly larvae which presently became 
dragon-flies, dazzling all Kent with their hovering 
sapphire bodies, and a nasty gelatinous, scummy 
growth that swelled over the pond margin, and sent 
its slimy green masses surging half-way up the garden 
path to Doctor Winkles’ house. And there began a 
growth of rushes and equisetum and potamogeton 
that ended only with the drying of the pond. 

It speedily became evident to the public mind that 
this time there was not simply one centre of distribu- 
tion, but quite a number of centres. There was one 
at Ealing, there can be no doubt now, and from that 
came the plague of flies and red spiders ; there was one 
at Sunbury, productive of ferocious great eels, that 
could come ashore and kill sheep ; and there was one 


148 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

in Bloomsbury that gave the world a new strain of 
cockroaches of a quite terrible sort — an old house it 
was in Bloomsbury, and much inhabited by undesir- 
able things. Abruptly the world found itself con- 
fronted with the Hickleybrow experiences all over 
again, with all sorts of queer exaggerations of famil- 
iar monsters in the place of the giant hens and rats 
and wasps. Each centre burst out with its own char- 
acteristic local fauna and flora. 

We know now that every one of these centres cor- 
responded to one of the patients of Doctor Winkles, 
but that was by no means apparent at the time. Doc- 
tor Winkles was the last person to incur any odium in 
the matter. There was a panic quite naturally, a pas- 
sionate indignation, but it was indignation not against 
Doctor Winkles but against the Food, and not so 
much against the Food as against the unfortunate 
Bensington, whom from the very first the popular 
imagination had insisted upon regarding as the sole 
and only person responsible for this new thing. 

The attempt to lynch him that followed is just one 
of those explosive events that bulk largely in history 
and are in reality the least significant of occurrences. 

The history of the outbreak is a mystery. The 
nucleus of the crowd certainly came from an Anti- 
Boomfood meeting in Hyde Park organised by ex- 
tremists of the Caterham party, but there seems no 
one in the world who actually first proposed, no one 
who ever first hinted a suggestion of the outrage at 
which so many people assisted. It is a problem for 


CH. V 


MR. BENSINGTON 


149 


M. Gustave le Bon, a mystery in the psychology of 
crowds. The fact emerges that about three o’clock 
on Sunday afternoon a remarkably big and ugly Lon- 
don crowd, entirely out of hand, came rolling down 
Thursday Street intent on Bensington’s exemplary 
death as a warning to all scientific investigators, and 
that it came nearer accomplishing its object than any 
London crowd has ever come since the Hyde Park 
railings came down in remote middle Victorian times. 
This crowd came so close to its object indeed, that for 
the space of an hour or more a word would have set- 
tled the unfortunate gentleman’s fate. 

The first intimation he had of the thing was the 
noise of the people outside. He went to the window 
and peered, realising nothing of what impended. For 
a minute perhaps he watched them seething about the 
entrance, disposing of an ineffectual dozen of police- 
men who barred their way, before he fully realised 
his own importance in the affair. It came upon him 
in a flash — that that roaring, swaying multitude was 
after him. He was all alone in the flat — fortunately 
perhaps — his cousin Jane having gone down to Eal- 
ing to have tea with a relation on her mother’s side, 
and he had no more idea of how to behave under 
such circumstances than he had of the etiquette of the 
Day of Judgment. He was still dashing about the 
flat asking his furniture what he should do, turning 
keys in locks and then unlocking them again, making 
darts at door and window and bedroom — when the 
floor clerk came to him. 


1 50 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

“There isn’t a moment, Sir,” he said. “They’ve 
got your number from the board in the hall ! They’re 
coming straight up !” 

He ran Mr. Bensington out into the passage, al- 
ready echoing with the approaching tumult from the 
great staircase, locked the door behind them, and led 
the way into the opposite flat by means of his dupli- 
cate key. 

“It’s our only chance now,” he said. 

He flung up a window which opened on a ventilat- 
ing shaft, and showed that the wall was set with iron 
staples that made the rudest and most perilous of wall 
ladders to serve as a fire escape from the upper flats. 
He shoved Mr. Bensington out of the window, 
showed him how to cling on, and pursued him up the 
ladder, goading and jabbing his legs with a bunch of 
keys whenever he desisted from climbing. It seemed 
to Bensington at times that he must climb that verti- 
cal ladder for evermore. Above, the parapet was in- 
accessibly remote, a mile perhaps, below — He 
did not care to think of things below. 

“Steady on!” cried the clerk, and gripped his an- 
kle. It was quite horrible having his ankle gripped 
like that, and Mr. Bensington tightened his hold on 
the iron staple above to a drowning clutch, and gave 
a faint squeal of terror. 

It became evident the clerk had broken a window, 
and then it seemed he had leapt a vast distance side- 
ways, and there came the noise of a window-frame 
sliding in its sash. He was bawling things. 

Mr. Bensington moved his head round cautiously 


CH. V 


MR. BENSINGTON 


I S I 


until he could see the clerk. “Come down six steps,” 
the clerk commanded. 

All this moving about seemed very foolish, but 
very, very cautiously Mr. Bensington lowered a foot. 

“Don’t pull me!” he cried, as the clerk made to 
help him from the open window. 

It seemed to him that to reach the window from 
the ladder would be a very respectable feat for a fly- 
ing fox, and it was rather with the idea of a decent 
suicide than in any hope of accomplishing it that he 
made the step at last, and quite ruthlessly the clerk 
pulled him in. “You’ll have to stop here,” said the 
clerk; “my keys are no good here. It’s an American 
lock. I’ll get out and slam the door behind me and 
see if I can find the man of this floor. You’ll be 
locked in. Don’t go to the window, that’s all. It’s 
the ugliest crowd I’ve ever seen. If only they think 
you’re out they’ll probably content themselves by 
breaking up your stuff ” 

“The indicator said In,” said Bensington. 

“The devil it did! Well, anyhow, I’d better not 
be found ” 

He vanished with a slam of the door. 

Bensington was left to his own initiative again. 

It took him under the bed. 

There presently he was found by Cossar. 

Bensington was almost comatose with terror when 
he was found, for Cossar had burst the door in with 
his shoulder by jumping at it across the breadth of 
the passage. 

“Come out of it, Bensington,” he said. “It’s all 


1 52 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

right. It’s me. We’ve got to get out of this. 
They’re setting the place on fire. The porters are all 
clearing out. The servants are gone. It’s lucky I 
caught the man who knew. 

“Look here!” 

Bensington, peering from under the bed, became 
aware of some unaccountable garments on Cossar’s 
arm, and, of all things, a black bonnet in his hand ! 

“They’re having a clear out,” said Cossar. “If 
they don’t set the place on fire they’ll come here. 
Troops may not be here for an hour yet. Fifty per 
cent. Hooligans in the crowd, and the more furnished 
flats they go into the better they’ll like it. Obviously. 
. . . They mean a clear out. You put this skirt 

and bonnet on, Bensington, and clear out with me.” 

“D’you mean — ?” began Bensington, protrud- 
ing a head, tortoise fashion. 

“I mean, put ’em on and come ! Obviously.” And 
with a sudden vehemence he dragged Bensington 
from under the bed, and began to dress him for his 
new impersonation of an elderly woman of the 
people. 

He rolled up his trousers and made him kick off 
his slippers, took off his collar and tie and coat and 
vest, slipped a black skirt over his head, and put on 
a red flannel bodice and a body over the same. He 
made him take off his all too characteristic spectacles, 
and clapped the bonnet on his head. “You might 
have been born an old woman,” he said as he tied the 
strings. Then came the spring-side boots — a terrible 


CH. V 


MR. BENSINGTON 


i53 

wrench for corns — and the shawl, and the disguise 
was complete. “Up and down,” said Cossar, and 
Bensington obeyed. 

“You’ll do,” said Cossar. 

And in this guise it was, stumbling awkwardly 
over his unaccustomed skirts, shouting womanly im- 
precations upon his own head in a weird falsetto to 
sustain his part, and to the roaring note of a crowd 
bent upon lynching him, that the original discoverer 
of Herakleophorbia IV. proceeded down the corridor 
of Chesterfield Mansions, mingled with that inflamed 
disorderly multitude, and passed out altogether from 
the thread of events that constitutes our story. 

Never once after that escape did he meddle again 
with the stupendous development of the Food of the 
Gods, he of all men had done most to begin. 

Ill 

This little man who started the whole thing passes 
out of the story, and after a time he passed altogether 
out of the world of things, visible and tellable. But 
because he started the whole thing it is seemly to give 
his exit an intercalary page of attention. One may 
picture him in his later days as Tunbridge Wells 
came to know him. For it was at Tunbridge Wells 
he reappeared after a temporary obscurity, so soon as 
he fully realised how transitory, how quite excep- 
tional and unmeaning that fury of rioting was. He 
reappeared under the wing of Cousin Jane, treating 


154 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. i 

himself for nervous shock to the exclusion of all other 
interests, and totally indifferent, as it seemed, to the 
battles that were raging then about those new centres 
of distribution, and about the baby Children of the 
Food. 

He took up his quarters at the Mount Glory 
Hydro-therapeutic Hotel, where there are quite ex- 
traordinary facilities for baths, Carbonated Baths, 
Creosote Baths, Galvanic and Faradic Treatment, 
Massage, Pine Baths, Starch and Hemlock Baths, 
Radium Baths, Light Baths, Heat Baths, Bran and 
Needle Baths, Tar and Birdsdown Baths, all sorts 
of baths; and he devoted his mind to the develop- 
ment of that system of curative treatment that was 
still imperfect when he died. And sometimes he 
would go down in a hired vehicle and a sealskin 
trimmed coat, and sometimes, when his feet per- 
mitted, he would walk to the Pantiles, and there he 
would sip chalybeate water under the eye of his 
cousin Jane. 

His stooping shoulders, his pink appearance, his 
beaming glasses, became a “feature” of Tunbridge 
Wells. No one was the least bit unkind to him, and 
indeed the place and the Hotel seemed very glad to 
have the distinction of his presence. Nothing could 
rob him of that distinction now. And though he pre- 
ferred not to follow the development of his great in- 
vention in the daily papers, yet when he crossed the 
Lounge of the Hotel or walked down the Pantiles 
and heard the whisper, “There he is ! That’s him !” 


CH. V 


MR. BENSINGTON 


*55 


it was not dissatisfaction that softened his mouth and 
gleamed for a moment in his eye. 

This little figure, this minute little figure, launched 
the Food of the Gods upon the world ! One does not 
know which is the most amazing, the greatness or the 
littleness of these scientific and philosophical men. 
You figure him there on the Pantiles, in the overcoat 
trimmed with fur. He stands under that chinaware 
window where the spring spouts, and holds and sips 
the glass of chalybeate water in his hand. One bright 
eye over the gilt rim is fixed, with an expression of 
inscrutable severity, on Cousin Jane. “M,” he says, 
and sips. 

So we make our souvenir, so we focus and photo- 
graph this discoverer of ours for the last time, and 
leave him, a mere dot in our foreground, and pass to 
the greater picture that has developed about him, to 
the story of his Food, how the scattered Giant Chil- 
dren grew up day by day into a world that was all too 
small for them, and how the net of Boomfood Laws 
and Boomfood Conventions, which the Boomfood 
Commission was weaving even then, drew closer and 
closer upon them with every year of their growth. 
Until 


BOOK II 


THE FOOD IN THE VILLAGE 








CHAPTER THE FIRST 


THE COMING OF THE FOOD 

I 

Our theme, which began so compactly in Mr. Ben- 
sington’s study, has already spread and branched, un- 
til it points this way and that, and henceforth our 
whole story is one of dissemination. To follow the 
Food of the Gods further is to trace the ramifications 
of a perpetually branching tree; in a little while, in 
the quarter of a lifetime, the Food had trickled and 
increased from its first spring in the little farm near 
Hickleybrow until it had spread, it and the report and 
shadow of its power, throughout the world. It 
spread beyond England very speedily. Soon in 
America, all over the continent of Europe, in Japan, 
in Australia, at last all over the world, the thing was 
working towards its appointed end. Always it 
worked slowly, by indirect courses and against re- 
sistance. It was bigness insurgent. In spite of prej- 
udice, in spite of law and regulation, in spite of all 
that obstinate conservatism that lies at the base of 
the formal order of mankind, the Food of the Gods, 
once it had been set going, pursued its subtle and in- 
vincible progress. 


159 


160 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


The Children of the Food grew steadily through all 
these years; that was the cardinal fact of the time. 
But it is the leakages make history. The children 
who had eaten grew, and soon there were other chil- 
dren growing; and all the best intentions in the world 
could not stop further leakages and still further leak- 
ages. The Food insisted on escaping with the per- 
tinacity of a thing alive. Flour treated with the 
stuff crumbled in dry weather almost as if by inten- 
tion into an impalpable powder, and would lift and 
travel before the lightest breeze. Now it would be 
some fresh insect won its way to a temporary fatal 
new development, now some fresh outbreak from the 
sewers of rats and such like vermin. For some days 
the village of Pangbourne in Berkshire fought with 
giant ants. Three men were bitten and died. There 
would be a panic, there would be a struggle, and the 
salient evil would be fought down again, leaving al- 
ways something behind, in the obscurer things of life 
— changed forever. Then again another acute and 
startling outbreak, a swift upgrowth of monstrous 
weedy thickets, a drifting dissemination about the 
world of inhumanly growing thistles, of cockroaches 
men fought with shot guns, or a plague of mighty 
flies. 

There were some strange and desperate struggles 
in obscure places. The Food begot heroes in the 
cause of littleness. . . . 

And men took such happenings into their lives, and 
met them by the expedients of the moment, and told 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 161 


one another there was “no change in the essential or- 
der of things.” After the first great panic, Cater- 
ham, in spite of his power of eloquence, became a 
secondary figure in the political world, remained in 
men’s minds as the exponent of an extreme view. 

Only slowly did he win a way towards a central po- 
sition in affairs. “There was no change in the essen- 
tial order of things” — that eminent leader of modern 
thought, Doctor Winkles, was very clear upon this 
— and the exponents of what was called in those days 
Progressive Liberalism grew quite sentimental upon 
the essential insincerity of their progress. Their 
dreams, it would appear, ran wholly on little nations, 
little languages, little households, each self-supported 
on its little farm. A fashion for the small and neat 
set in. To be big was to be “vulgar,” and dainty, 
neat, mignon, miniature, “minutely perfect,” became 
the key words of critical approval. . . . 

Meanwhile, quietly, taking their time as children 
must, the Children of the Food, growing into a world 
that changed to receive them, gathered strength and 
stature and knowledge, became individual and pur- 
poseful, rose slowly towards the dimensions of their 
destiny. Presently they seemed a natural part of the 
world; all these stirrings of bigness seemed a natural 
part of the world, and men wondered how things had 
been before their time. There came to men’s ears 
stories of things the giant boys could do, and they 
said “Wonderful!” — without a spark of wonder. 
The popular papers would tell of the three sons of 


1 62 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


Cossar, and how these amazing children would lift 
great cannons, hurl masses of iron for hundreds of 
yards, and leap two hundred feet. They were said to 
be digging a well, deeper than any well or mine that 
man had ever made, seeking, it was said, for treas- 
ures hidden in the earth since ever the earth began. 

These Children, said the popular magazines, will 
level mountains, bridge seas, tunnel your earth to a 
honeycomb. “Wonderful!” said the little folks, 
“isn’t it? What a lot of conveniences we shall have !” 
and went about their business as though there was no 
such thing as the Food of the Gods on earth. And 
indeed these things were no more than the first hints 
and promises of the powers of the Children of the 
Food. It was still no more than child’s play with 
them, no more than the first use of a strength in 
which no purpose had arisen. They did not know 
themselves for what they were. They were children, 
slow-growing children of a new race. The giant 
strength grew day by day — the giant will had still to 
grow into purpose and an aim. 

Looking at it in a shortened perspective of time, 
those years of transition have the quality of a single 
consecutive occurrence; but indeed no one saw the 
coming of Bigness in the world, as no one in all the 
world till centuries had passed saw, as one happening, 
the Decline and Fall of Rome. They who lived in 
those days were too much among these developments 
to see them together as a single thing. It seemed even 
to wise men that the Food was giving the world noth- 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 163 

ing but a crop of unmanageable, disconnected irrele- 
vancies, that might shake and trouble indeed, but 
could do no more to the established order and fabric 
of mankind. 

To one observer at least the most wonderful thing 
throughout that period of accumulating stress is the 
invincible inertia of the great mass of people, their 
quiet persistence in all that ignored the enormous 
presences, the promises of still more enormous things, 
that grew among them. Just as many a stream will 
be at its smoothest, will look most tranquil, running 
deep and strong, at the very verge of a cataract, so 
all that is most conservative in man seemed settling 
quietly into a serene ascendency during these latter 
days. Reaction became popular, there was talk of 
the bankruptcy of science, of the dying of Progress, 
of the advent of the Mandarins, talk of such things 
amidst the echoing footsteps of the Children of the 
Food. The fussy pointless Revolutions of the old 
time, a vast crowd of silly little people chasing some 
silly little monarch and the like, had indeed died out 
and passed away; but Change had not died out. It 
was only Change that had changed. The New was 
coming in its own fashion and beyond the common 
understanding of the world. 

To tell fully of its coming would be to write a 
great history, but everywhere there was a parallel 
chain of happenings. To tell therefore of the man- 
ner of its coming in one place is to tell something of 
the whole. It chanced one stray seed of Immensity 


1 64 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. n 

fell into the pretty petty village of Cheasing Eye- 
bright in Kent, and the story of its queer germination 
there and of the tragic futility that ensued, one may 
attempt — following one thread, as it were, to show 
the direction in which the whole great interwoven 
fabric of the thing rolled off the loom of Time. 

II 

Cheasing Eyebright had of course a Vicar. There 
are vicars and vicars, and of all sorts I love an inno- 
vating vicar, a piebald progressive professional reac- 
tionary, the least. But the Vicar of Cheasing Eye- 
bright was one of the least innovating of vicars, a 
most worthy, plump, ripe, and conservative-minded 
little man. It is becoming to go back a little in our 
story to tell of him. He matched his village, and one 
may figure them best together as they used to be, on 
the sunset evening when Mrs. Skinner — you will re- 
member her flight! — brought the Food with her all 
unsuspected into these rustic serenities. 

The village was looking its very best just then, un- 
der that western light. It lay down along the valley 
beneath the beechwoods of the Hanger, a beading of 
thatched and red-tiled cottages, cottages with trellised 
porches and pyracanthus-lined faces, that clustered 
closer and closer as the road dropped from the yew 
trees by the church towards the bridge. The vicarage 
peeped not too ostentatiously between the trees be- 
yond the inn, an early Georgian front ripened by 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 165 

time, and the spire of the church rose happily in 
the depression made by the valley in the out- 
line of the hills. A winding stream, a thin inter- 
mittency of sky blue and foam, glittered amidst a 
thick margin of reeds and loose-strife and overhang- 
ing willows, along the centre of a sinuous pennant of 
meadow. The whole prospect had that curiously 
English quality of ripened cultivation, that look of 
still completeness that apes perfection, under the sun- 
set warmth. 

And the Vicar, too, looked mellow. He looked 
habitually and essentially mellow, as though he had 
been a mellow baby born into a mellow class, a ripe 
and juicy little boy. One could see, even before he 
mentioned it, that he had gone to an ivy-clad public 
school in its anecdotage, with magnificent traditions, 
aristocratic associations and no chemical laboratories, 
and proceeded thence to a venerable college in the 
very ripest Gothic. Few books he had younger than 
a thousand years; of these, Yarrow and Ellis and 
good pre-Methodist sermons made the bulk. He was 
a man of moderate height, a little shortened in ap- 
pearance by his equatorial dimensions, and a face 
that had been mellow from the first was now climac- 
terically ripe. The beard of a David hid his redun- 
dancy of chin ; he wore no watch chain out of refine- 
ment, and his modest clerical garments were made by 
a West End tailor. . . . And he sat with a 

hand on either shin, blinking at his village in beatific 
approval. He waved a plump palm towards it. His 


1 66 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. n 


burthen sang out again. What more could any one 
desire ? 

“We are fortunately situated,” he said, putting the 
thing tamely. 

“We are in a fastness of the hills,” he expanded. 

He explained himself at length. “We are out 
of it all.” 

For they had been talking, he and his friend, of 
the Horrors of the Age, of Democracy, and Secular 
Education, and Sky Scrapers, and Motor Cars, and 
the American Invasion, the Scrappy Reading of the 
Public, and the disappearance of any Taste at all. 

“We are out of it all,” he repeated, and even as 
he spoke, the footsteps of some one coming smote 
upon his ear and he rolled over and regarded her. 

You figure the old woman’s steadfastly tremulous 
advance, the bundle clutched in her gnarled lank 
hand, her nose (which was her countenance) wrin- 
kled with breathless resolution. You see the poppies 
nodding fatefully on her bonnet, and the dust-white 
spring-sided boots beneath her skimpy skirts, pointing 
with an irrevocable slow alternation east and west. 
Beneath her arm, a restive captive waggled and 
slipped a scarcely valuable umbrella. What was 
there to tell the Vicar that this grotesque old 
figure was — so far as his village was concerned at 
any rate — no less than Fruitful Chance and the Un- 
foreseen, the Hag weak men call Fate. But for us, 
you understand, no more than Mrs. Skinner. 

As she was too much encumbered for a curtsey, 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 167 

she pretended not to see him and his friend at all, and 
so passed flip, flop, within three yards of them, on- 
ward down towards the village. The Vicar watched 
her slow transit in silence, and ripened a remark the 
while. . . . 

The incident seemed to him of no importance 
whatever. Old womenkind, aere perennius, has car- 
ried bundles since the world began. What difference 
has it made? 

“We are out of it all,” said the Vicar. “We live 
in an atmosphere of simple and permanent things, 
Birth and Toil, simple seed-time and simple harvest. 
The Uproar passes us by.” He was always very 
great upon what he called the permanent things. 
“Things change,” he would say, “but Humanity — 
aere perennius” 

Thus the Vicar. He loved a classical quotation 
subtly misapplied. Below, Mrs. Skinner, inelegant 
but resolute, had involved herself curiously with Wil- 
merding’s stile. 


Ill 

No one knows what the Vicar made of the Giant 
Puff-Balls. 

No doubt he was among the first to discover them. 
They were scattered at intervals up and down the 
path between the near down and the village end, a 
path he frequented daily in his constitutional round. 
Altogether, of these abnormal fungi there were, from 


1 68 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


first to last, quite thirty. The Vicar seems to have 
stared at each severally and to have prodded most of 
them with his stick once or twice. Once he attempted 
to measure with his arms, but it burst at his Ixion em- 
brace. 

He spoke to several people about them and said 
they were “marvellous!” and he related to at least 
seven different persons the well-known story of the 
flagstone that was lifted from the cellar floor by a 
growth of fungi beneath. He looked up his Sowerby 
to see if it was Lycoperdon coelatum or giganteum — 
like all his kind since Gilbert White became famous, 
he Gilbert-Whited. He cherished a theory that 
giganteum is unfairly named. 

One does not know if he observed that those white 
spheres lay in the very track that old woman of yes- 
terday had followed, or if he noted that the last of 
the series swelled not a score of yards from the gate 
of the Caddies’ cottage. If he observed these things, 
he made no attempt to place his observation on rec- 
ord. His observation in matters botanical was what 
the inferior sort of scientific people call a “trained 
observation” — you look for certain definite things 
and neglect everything else. And he did nothing to 
link this phenomenon with the remarkable expansion 
of the Caddies’ baby that had been going on now for 
some weeks, indeed ever since Caddies walked over 
one Sunday afternoon a month or more ago to see his 
mother-in-law and hear Mr. Skinner (since defunct) 
brag about his management of hens. 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 169 


IV 

The growth of the puff-balls following on the ex- 
pansion of the Caddies’ baby really ought to have 
opened the Vicar’s eyes. The latter fact had already 
come right into his arms at the christening — almost 
overpoweringly. . . . 

The youngster bawled with deafening violence 
when the cold water that sealed its divine inheritance 
and its right to the name of “Albert Edward Cad- 
dies” fell upon its brow. It was already beyond ma- 
ternal porterage, and Caddies, staggering indeed, but 
grinning triumphantly at quantitatively inferior par- 
ents, bore it back to the free-sitting occupied by his 
party. 

“I never saw such a child!” said the Vicar. 

This was the first public intimation that the Cad- 
dies’ baby, which had begun its earthly career a little 
under seven pounds, did after all intend to be a credit 
to its parents. Very soon it was clear it meant to be 
not only a credit but a glory. And within a month 
their glory shone so brightly as to be in connection 
with people in the Caddies’ position, improper. 

The butcher weighed the infant eleven times. He 
was a man of few words, and he soon got through 
with them. The first time he said, “ ’E’s a good ’un 
the next time he said, “My word!” the third time he 
said, “Well, mum,” and after that he simply blew 
enormously each time, scratched his head, and looked 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


170 

at his scales with an unprecedented mistrust. Every 
one came to see the Big Baby — so it was called by 
universal consent — and most of them said, “ ’E’s a 
Bouncer,” and almost all remarked to him, “ Did 
they?” Miss Fletcher came and said she “never 
did,” which was perfectly true. 

Lady Wondershoot, the village tyrant, arrived the 
day after the third weighing, and inspected the phe- 
nomenon narrowly through glasses that filled it with 
howling terror. “It’s an unusually Big child,” she 
told its mother, in a loud instructive voice. “You 
ought to take unusual care of it, Caddies. Of course 
it won’t go on like this, being bottle fed, but we must 
do what we can for it. I’ll send you down some more 
flannel.” 

The doctor came and measured the child with a 
tape, and put the figures in a notebook, and old Mr. 
Drifthassock, who farmed by Up Marden, brought 
a manure traveller two miles out of their way to look 
at it. The traveller asked the child’s age three times 
over, and said finally that he was blowed. He left 
it to be inferred how and why he was blowed; appar- 
ently it was the child’s size blowed him. He also said 
it ought to be put into a baby show. And all day 
long, out of school hours, little children kept coming 
and saying, “Please, Mrs. Caddies, mum, may we 
have a look at your baby, please, mum,” until Mrs. 
Caddies had to put a stop to it. And amidst all these 
scenes of amazement came Mrs. Skinner, and stood 
and smiled, standing somewhat in the background, 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 171 

with each sharp elbow in a lank gnarled hand, and 
smiling, smiling under and about her nose, with a 
smile of infinite profundity. 

“It makes even that old wretch of a grandmother 
look quite pleasant,” said Lady Wondershoot. 
“Though I’m sorry she’s come back to the vil- 
lage.” 

Of course, as with almost all cottagers’ babies, the 
eleemosynary element had already come in, but the 
child soon made it clear by colossal bawling, that so 
far as the filling of its bottle went, it hadn’t come in 
yet nearly enough. 

The baby was entitled to a nine days’ wonder, and 
every one wondered happily over its amazing growth 
for twice that time and more. And then you know, 
instead of its dropping into the background and giv- 
ing place to other marvels, it went on growing more 
than ever! 

Lady Wondershoot heard Mrs. Greenfield, her 
housekeeper, with infinite amazement. 

“Caddies downstairs again. No food for the 
child! My dear Greenfield, it’s impossible. The 
creature eats like a hippopotamus ! I’m sure it can’t 
be true.” 

“I’m sure I hope you’re not being imposed upon, 
my lady,” said Mrs. Greenfield. 

“It’s so difficult to tell with these people,” said 
Lady Wondershoot. “Now I do wish, my good 
Greenfield, that you’d just go down there yourself 
this afternoon and see — see it have its bottle. Big as 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


172 

it is, I cannot imagine that it needs more than six 
pints a day.” 

“It hasn’t no business to, my lady,” said Mrs. 
Greenfield. 

The hand of Lady Wondershoot quivered, with 
that C.O.S. sort of emotion, that suspicious rage that 
stirs in all true aristocrats, at the thought that possi- 
bly the meaner classes are after all — as mean as their 
betters, and — where the sting lies — scoring points in 
the game. 

But Mrs. Greenfield could observe no evidence of 
peculation, and the order for an increasing daily sup- 
ply to the Caddies’ nursery was issued. Scarcely had 
the first instalment gone, when Caddies was back 
again at the great house in a state abjectly apologetic. 

“We took the greates’ care of ’em, Mrs. Green- 
field, I do assure you, mum, but he’s regular burst 
em ! They flew with such vilence, mum, that one but- 
ton broke a pane of the window, mum, and one hit me 
a regular stinger jest ’ere, mum.” 

Lady Wondershoot, when she heard that this 
amazing child had positively burst out of its beauti- 
ful charity clothes, decided that she must speak to 
Caddies herself. He appeared in her presence with 
his hair hastily wetted and smoothed by hand, breath- 
less, and clinging to his hat brim as though it was a 
life-belt, and he stumbled at the carpet edge out of 
sheer distress of mind. 

Lady Wondershoot liked bullying Caddies. Cad- 
dies was her ideal lower-class person, dishonest, faith- 


ch. i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 173 

ful, abject, industrious, and inconceivably incapable 
of responsibility. She told him it was a serious mat- 
ter, the way his child was going on. 

“It’s ’is appetite, my ladyship,” said Caddies, with 
a rising note. 

“Check ’im, my ladyship, you can’t,” said Cad- 
dies. “There ’e lies, my ladyship, and kicks out ’e 
does, and ’owls, that distressin’. We ’aven’t the ’eart, 
my ladyship. If we ’ad — the neighbours would in- 
terfere. . . .” 

Lady Wondershoot consulted the parish doctor. 

“What I want to know,” said Lady Wondershoot, 
“is it right this child should have such an extraor- 
dinary quantity of milk?” 

“The proper allowance for a child of that age,” 
said the parish doctor, “is a pint and a half to two 
pints in the twenty-four hours. I don’t see that you 
are called upon to provide more. If you do, it is 
your own generosity. Of course we might try the 
legitimate quantity for a few days. But the child, 
I must admit, seems for some reason to be physiologi- 
cally different. Possibly what is called a Sport. A 
case of General Hypertrophy.” 

“It isn’t fair to the other parish children,” said 
Lady Wondershoot. “I am certain we shall have 
complaints if this goes on.” 

“I don’t see that any one can be expected to give 
more than the recognised allowance. We might in- 
sist on its doing with that or if it wouldn’t, send it as 
a case into the Infirmary.” 


174 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 

“I suppose,” said Lady Wondershoot, reflecting, 
“that apart from the size and the appetite, you don’t 
find anything else abnormal — nothing monstrous?” 

“No. No, I don’t. But no doubt if this growth 
goes on, we shall find grave moral and intellectual 
deficiencies. One might almost prophesy that from 
Max Nordau’s law. A most gifted and celebrated 
philosopher, Lady Wondershoot. He discovered 
that the abnormal is — abnormal, a most valuable dis- 
covery, and well worth bearing in mind. I find it of 
the utmost help in practice. When I come upon any- 
thing abnormal, I say at once, This is abnormal.” 
His eyes became profound, his voice dropped, his 
manner verged upon the intimately confidential. He 
raised one hand stiffly. “And I treat it in that spirit,” 
he said. 

V 

“Tut, tut!” said the Vicar to his breakfast things 
— the day after the coming of Mrs. Skinner. “Tut, 
tut! what’s this?” and poised his glasses at his paper 
with a general air of remonstrance. 

“Giant wasps! What’s the world coming to? 
. . . American journalists, I suppose! Hang 

these Novelties ! Giant gooseberries are good enough 
for me. 

“Nonsense !” said the Vicar, and drank off his cof- 
fee at a gulp, eyes steadfast on the paper, and 
smacked his lips incredulously. 


ch. i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 175 

“Bosh!” said the Vicar, rejecting the hint alto- 
gether. 

But the next day there was more of it, and the light 
came. 

Not all at once, however. When he went for his 
constitutional that day he was still chuckling at the 
absurd story his paper would have had him believe. 
Wasps indeed — killing a dog! Incidentally as he 
passed by the site of that first crop of puff-balls he 
remarked that the grass was growing very rank there, 
but he did not connect that in any way with the matter 
of his amusement. “We should certainly have heard 
something of it,” he said; “Whitstable can’t be 
twenty miles from here.” 

Beyond he found another puff-ball, one of the sec- 
ond crop, rising like a roc’s egg out of the abnormally 
coarsened turf. 

The thing came upon him in a flash. 

He did not take his usual round that morning. In- 
stead he turned aside by the second stile and came 
round to the Caddies’ cottage. “Where’s that baby?” 
he demanded, and at the sight of it, “Goodness 
me!” 

He went up the village blessing his heart and met 
the doctor full tilt coming down. He grasped his , 
arm. “What does this mean?” he said. “Have you 
seen the paper these last few days?” 

The doctor said he had. 

“Well, what’s the matter with that child? What’s 
the matter with everything, wasps, puff-balls, babies, 


1 76 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 

eh? What’s making them grow so big? This is 
most unexpected. In Kent too ! If it was America 
now ” 

“It’s a little difficult to say just what it is,” said the 
doctor. “So far as I can grasp the symptoms ” 

“Yes?” 

“It’s Hypertrophy — General Hypertrophy.” 

“Hypertrophy?” 

“Yes. General — affecting all the bodily structures 
— all the organism. I may say that in my own mind, 
between ourselves, I’m very nearly convinced it’s that. 

. . . But one has to be careful.” 

“Ah,” said the Vicar, a good deal relieved to find 
the doctor equal to the situation. “But how is it it’s 
breaking out in this fashion, all over the place?” 

“That again,” said the doctor, “is difficult to say.” 

“Urshot. Here. It’s a pretty clear case of spread- 
ing.” 

“Yes,” said the doctor. “Yes. I think so. It has 
a strong resemblance at any rate to some sort of epi- 
demic. Probably Epidemic Hypertrophy will meet 
the case.” 

“Epidemic !” said the Vicar. “You don’t mean it’s 
contagious?” 

The doctor smiled gently and rubbed one hand 
against the other. “That I couldn’t say,” he said. 

“But — !” cried the Vicar, round-eyed. “If it’s 
catching — it — it affects us!” 

He made a stride up the road and turned about. 

“I’ve just been there,” he cried. “Hadn’t I bet- 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 177 

ter — ? I’ll go home at once and have a bath and 
fumigate my clothes.” 

The doctor regarded his retreating back for a mo- 
ment and then turned about and went towards his own 
house. 

But on the way he reflected that one case had been 
in the village a month without any one catching the 
disease, and after a pause of hesitation decided to be 
as brave as a doctor should be and take the risks like 
a man. 

And indeed he was well advised by his second 
thoughts. Growth was the last thing that could ever 
happen to him again. He could have eaten — and the 
Vicar could have eaten — Herakleophorbia by the 
truckful. For growth had done with them. Growth 
had done with these two gentlemen for evermore. 

VI 

It was a day or so after this conversation, a day or 
so that is after the burning of the Experimental Farm, 
that Winkles came to Redwood and showed him an 
insulting letter. It was an anonymous letter, and an 
author should respect his character’s secrets. “You 
are only taking credit for a natural phenomenon,” 
said the letter, “and trying to advertise yourself by 
your letter to the Times. You and your Boomfood! 
Let me tell you, this absurdly named food of yours 
has only the most accidental connection with those 
big wasps and rats. The plain fact is there is an epi- 


178 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 

demic of Hypertrophy — Contagious Hypertrophy — 
which you have about as much claim to control as 
you have to control the solar system. The thing is as 
old as the hills. There was Hypertrophy in the fam- 
ily of Anak. Quite outside your range, at Cheasing 
Eyebright, at the present time there is a baby ” 

“Shaky up and down writing. Old gentleman ap- r 
parently,” said Redwood. “But it’s odd a baby ” 

He read a few lines further and had an inspiration. 

“By Jove!” said he. “That’s my missing Mrs. 
Skinner !” 

He descended upon her suddenly in the afternoon 
of the following day. 

She was engaged in pulling onions in the little gar- 
den before her daughter’s cottage when she saw him 
coming through the garden gate. She stood for a 
moment “consternated,” as the country folks say, 
and then folded her arms, and with the little bunch 
of onions held defensively under her left elbow, 
awaited his approach. Her mouth opened and shut 
several times ; she mumbled her remaining tooth, and 
once quite suddenly she curtsied, like the blink of an 
arc-light. 

“I thought I should find you,” said Redwood. 

“I thought you might, Sir,” she said, without joy. 

“Where’s Skinner?” 

“ ’E ain’t never written to me, Sir, not once, nor 
come nigh of me since I came here, Sir.” 

“Don’t you know what’s become of him?” 

“Him not having written, no, Sir,” and she edged 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 179 

a step towards the left with an imperfect idea of cut- 
ting off Redwood from the barn door. 

“No one knows what has become of him,” said 
Redwood. 

“I dessay V knows,” said Mrs. Skinner. 

“He doesn’t tell.” 

“He was always a great one for looking after ’im- 
self and leaving them that was near and dear to ’im 
in trouble, was Skinner. Though clever as could be,” 
said Mrs. Skinner. 

“Where’s this child?” asked Redwood abruptly. 

She begged his pardon. 

“This child I hear about, the child you’ve been giv- 
ing our stuff to — the child that weighs two stone.” 

Mrs. Skinner’s hands worked and she dropped the 
onions. “Reely, Sir,” she protested, “I don’t hardly 
know, Sir, what you mean. My daughter, Sir, Mrs. 
Caddies, ’ as a baby, Sir.” And she made an agitated 
curtsey and tried to look innocently inquiring by tilt- 
ing her nose to one side. 

“You’d better let me see that baby, Mrs. Skinner,” 
said Redwood. 

Mrs. Skinner unmasked an eye at him as she led 
the way towards the barn. “Of course, Sir, there 
may ’ave been a little, in a little can of Nicey I give 
his father to bring over from the farm, or a little per- 
haps what I happened to bring about with me, so to 
speak. Me packing in a hurry and all . . 

“Um !” said Redwood, after he had cluckered to 
the infant for a space. “Oom !” 


180 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 

He told Mrs. Caddies the baby was a very fine 
child indeed, a thing that was getting well home to 
her intelligence — and he ignored her altogether after 
that. Presently she left the barn — through sheer in- 
significance. 

“Now you’ve started him, you’ll have to keep on 
with him, you know,” he said to Mrs. Skinner. 

He turned on her abruptly. “Don’t splash it 
about this time,” he said. 

“Splash it about, Sir?” 

“Oh! you know.” 

She indicated knowledge by convulsive gestures. 

“You haven’t told these people here? The par- 
ents, the squire and so on at the big house, the doc- 
tor, no one?” 

Mrs. Skinner shook her head. 

“I wouldn’t,” said Redwood. . . . 

He went to the door of the barn and surveyed the 
world about him. The door of the barn looked be- 
tween the end of the cottage and some disused pig- 
geries through a five-barred gate upon the high road. 
Beyond was a high red brick wall rich with ivy and 
wallflower and pennywort and set along the top with 
broken glass. Beyond the corner of the wall, a sunlit 
notice board amidst green and yellow branches reared 
itself above the rich tones of the first fallen leaves 
and announced that “Trespassers in these Woods 
will be Prosecuted.” The dark shadow of a gap 
in the hedge threw a stretch of barbed wire into 
relief. 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 181 


“Um,” said Redwood, then in a deeper note, 
“Oom!” 

There came a clatter of horses and the sound of 
wheels and Lady Wondershoot’s greys came into 
view. He marked the faces of coachman and foot- 
man as the equipage approached. The coachman was 
a very fine specimen, full and fruity, and he drove 
with a sort of sacramental dignity. Others might 
doubt their calling and position in the world, he at 
any rate was sure — he drove her ladyship. The foot- 
man sat beside him with folded arms and a face of 
inflexible certainties. Then the great lady herself 
became visible, in a hat and mantle disdainfully in- 
elegant, peering through her glasses. Two young 
ladies protruded necks and peered also. 

The Vicar passing on the other side swept off the 
hat from his David’s brow unheeded. 

Redwood remained standing in the doorway for a 
long time after the carriage had passed, his hands 
folded behind him. His eyes went to the green grey 
upland of down, and into the cloud curdled sky, and 
came back to the glass-set wall. He turned upon the 
cool shadows within and amidst spots and blurs of 
colour regarded the giant child amidst that Rem- 
brandtesque gloom, naked except for a swathing of 
flannel, seated upon a huge truss of straw and play- 
ing with its toes. 

“I begin to see what we have done,” he said. 

He mused, and young Caddies and his own child 
and Cossar’s brood mingled in his musing. 


1 82 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


He laughed abruptly. “Good Lord!” he said at 
some passing thought. 

He roused himself presently and addressed Mrs. 
Skinner. “Anyhow he mustn’t be tortured by a 
break in his food. That at least we can prevent. I 
shall send you a can every six months. That ought 
to do for him all right.” 

Mrs. Skinner mumbled something about “if you 
think so, Sir,” and “probably got packed by mis- 
take. . . . Thought no harm in giving him a 
little,” and so by the aid of various aspen gestures 
indicated that she understood. 

So the child went on growing. 

And growing. 

“Practically,” said Lady Wondershoot, “he’s 
eaten up every calf in the place. If I have any more 
of this sort of thing from that man Caddies ” 

VII 

But even so secluded a place as Cheasing Eye- 
bright could not rest for long in the theory of Hyper- 
trophy — Contagious or not — in view of the growing 
hubbub about the Food. In a little while there were 
painful explanations for Mrs. Skinner — explanations 
that reduced her to speechless mumblings of her re- 
maining tooth — explanations that probed her and 
ransacked her and exposed her — until at last she was 
driven to take refuge from a universal convergence of 
blame in the dignity of inconsolable widowhood. She 


ch.i THE COMING OF THE FOOD 183 

turned her eye — which she constrained to be watery 
— upon the angry Lady of the Manor, and wiped 
suds from her hands. 

“You forget, my lady, what I’m bearing up 
under.” 

And she followed up this warning note with a 
slightly defiant: 

“It’s ’IM I think of, my lady, night and day.” 

She compressed her lips and her voice flattened and 
faltered: “Bein’ et, my lady.” 

And having established herself on these grounds, 
she repeated the affirmation her ladyship had refused 
before. “I ’ad no more idea what I was giving 
the child, my lady, than any one could ’ave. . . .” 

Her ladyship turned her mind in more hopeful 
directions, wigging Caddies of course tremendously 
by the way. Emissaries, full of diplomatic threat- 
enings, entered the whirling lives of Bensington and 
Redwood. They presented themselves as Parish 
Councillors, stolid and clinging phonographically to 
prearranged statements. “We hold you responsible, 
Mr. Bensington, for the injury inflicted upon our par- 
ish, Sir. We hold you responsible.” 

A firm of solicitors, with a snake of a style, Bang- 
hurst, Brown, Flapp, Codlin, Brown, Tedder, and 
Snoxton, they called themselves, and appeared invari- 
ably in the form of a small rufous cunning-looking 
gentleman with a pointed nose, said vague things 
about damages, and there was a polished personage, 
her ladyship’s agent, who came in suddenly upon 


i84 the DAWN OF THE FOOD bk.ii 

Redwood one day and asked, “Well, Sir, and what 
do you propose to do?” 

To which Redwood answered that he proposed to 
discontinue supplying the food for the child, if he 
or Bensington were bothered any further about the 
matter. “I give it for nothing as it is,” he said, “and 
the child will yell your village to ruins before it dies 
if you don’t let it have the stuff. The child’s on your 
hands and you have to keep it. Lady Wondershoot 
can’t always be Lady Bountiful and Earthly Provi- 
dence of her parish without sometimes meeting a re- 
sponsibility, you know.” 

“The mischief’s done,” Lady Wondershoot de- 
cided when they told her — with expurgations — what 
Redwood had said. 

“The mischief’s done,” echoed the Vicar. 

Though indeed as a matter of fact the mischief 
was only beginning. 


CHAPTER THE SECOND 


THE BRAT GIGANTIC 

I 

The giant child was ugly — the Vicar would insist. 
“He always had been ugly — as all excessive things 
must be.” The Vicar’s views had carried him out of 
sight of just judgment in this matter. The child was 
much subjected to snapshots even in that rustic retire- 
ment, and their net testimony is against the Vicar, tes- 
tifying that the young monster was at first almost 
pretty, with a copious curl of hair reaching to his 
brow and a great readiness to smile. Usually Cad- 
dies, who was slightly built, stands smiling behind 
the baby, perspective emphasising his relative small- 
ness. 

After the second year the good looks of the child 
became more subtle and more contestable. He began 
to grow, as his unfortunate grandfather would no 
doubt have put it, “rank.” He lost colour and devel- 
oped an increasing effect of being somehow, albeit 
colossal, yet slight. He was vastly delicate. His 
eyes and something about his face grew finer, grew, 
as people say, “interesting.” His hair, after one cut- 
ting, began to tangle into a mat. “It’s the degener- 
l8 S 


1 86 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


ate strain coming out of him,” said the parish doc- 
tor, marking these things, but just how far he was 
right in that, and just how far the youngster’s lapse 
from ideal healthfulness was the result of living en- 
tirely in a white-washed barn upon Lady Wonder- 
shoot’s sense of charity tempered by justice, is open 
to question. 

The photographs of him that present him from 
three to six show him developing into a round-eyed, 
flaxen-haired youngster with a truncated nose and a 
friendly stare. There lurks about his lips that never 
very remote promise of a smile that all the photo- 
graphs of the early giant children display. In sum- 
mer he wears loose garments of ticking tacked to- 
gether with string; there is usually one of those 
straw baskets upon his head that workmen use for 
their tools, and he is barefooted. In one picture 
he grins broadly and holds a bitten melon in his 
hand. 

The winter pictures are less numerous and satisfac- 
tory. He wears huge sabots, no doubt of beechwood, 
and (as fragments of the inscription “John Stickells, 
Iping” show) sacks for socks, and his trousers and 
jacket are unmistakably cut from the remains of a 
gaily patterned carpet. Underneath that there were 
rude swathings of flannel; five or six yards of flannel 
are tied comforter fashion about his neck. The thing 
on his head is probably another sack. He stares, 
sometimes smiling, sometimes a little ruefully, at the 
camera. Even when he was only five years old, one 


ch.ii THE BRAT GIGANTIC 187 

sees that half whimsical wrinkling over his soft brown 
eyes that characterised his face. 

He was from the first, the Vicar always declared, 
a terrible nuisance about the village. He seems to 
have had a proportionate impulse to play, much curi- 
osity and sociability, and in addition there was a cer- 
tain craving within him — I grieve to say — for more 
to eat. In spite of what Mrs. Greenfield called an 
“ excessively generous” allowance of food from Lady 
Wondershoot, he displayed what the doctor per- 
ceived at once was the “Criminal Appetite.” It car- 
ries out only too completely Lady Wondershoot’s 
worst experiences of the lower classes, that in spite 
of an allowance of nourishment inordinately beyond 
what is known to be the maximum necessity even of 
an adult human being, the creature was found to 
steal. And what he stole he ate with an inelegant 
voracity. His great hand would come over garden 
walls; he would covet the very bread in the baker’s 
carts. Cheeses went from Marlow’s store loft, and 
never a pig trough was safe from him. Some farmer 
walking over his field of swedes would find the great 
« spoor of his feet and the evidence of his nibbling 
hunger, a root picked here, a root picked there, and 
the holes, with childish cunning, heavily erased. He 
ate a swede as one devours a radish. He would stand 
and eat apples from a tree, if no one was about, as 
normal children eat blackberries from a bush. In one 
way at any rate this shortness of provisions was good 
for the peace of Cheasing Eyebright — for many 


1 88 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk . n 


years he ate up every grain very nearly of the Food 
of the Gods that was given him. . . . 

Indisputably the child was troublesome and out 
of place. “He was always about,” the Vicar used 
to say. He could not go to school; he could not go 
to church by virtue of the obvious limitations of its 
cubical content. There was some attempt to satisfy 
the spirit of that “most foolish and destructive law” 
— I quote the Vicar — the Elementary Education Act 
of 1870, by getting him to sit outside the open win- 
dow while instruction was going on within. But his 
presence there destroyed the discipline of the other 
children. They were always popping up and peering 
at him, and every time he spoke they laughed to- 
gether. His voice was so odd ! So they let him stay 
away. 

Nor did they persist in pressing him to come to 
church, for his vast proportions were of little help to 
devotion. Yet there they might have had an easier 
task; there are good reasons for guessing there were 
the germs of religious feeling somewhere in that big 
carcase. The music perhaps drew him. He was 
often in the churchyard on a Sunday morning, pick- 
ing his way softly among the graves after the congre- 
gation had gone in, and he would sit the whole ser- 
vice out beside the porch, listening as one listens out- 
side a hive of bees. 

At first he showed a certain want of tact ; the peo- 
ple inside would hear his great feet crunch restlessly 
round their place of worship, or become aware of his 


ch. ii THE BRAT GIGANTIC 189 

dim face peering in through the stained glass, half 
curious, half envious, and at times some simple hymn 
would catch him unawares and he would howl lugu- 
briously in a gigantic attempt at unison. Where- 
upon little Sloppet, who was organ-blower and 
verger and beadle and sexton and bell-ringer on Sun- 
days, besides being postman and chimney-sweep all 
the week, would go out very briskly and valiantly and 
send him mournfully away. Sloppet, I am glad to 
say, felt it — in his more thoughtful moments at any 
rate. It was like sending a dog home when you start 
out for a walk, he told me. 

But the intellectual and moral training of young 
Caddies, though fragmentary, was explicit. From 
the first, Vicar, mother and all the world, combined 
to make it clear to him that his giant strength was not 
for use. It was a misfortune that he had to make the 
best of. He had to mind what was told him, do what 
was set him, be careful never to break anything nor 
hurt anything. Particularly he must not go treading 
on things or jostling against things or jumping about. 
He had to salute the gentlefolks respectfully and be 
grateful for the food and clothing they spared 
him out of their riches. And he learnt all these 
things submissively, being by nature and habit 
a teachable creature and only by food and accident 
gigantic. 

For Lady Wondershoot, in these early days, he 
displayed the profoundest awe. She found she could 
talk to him best when she was in short skirts and had 


190 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


her dog-whip, and she gesticulated with that and was 
always a little contemptuous and shrill. But some- 
times the Vicar played master, a minute, middle-aged, 
rather breathless David pelting a childish Goliath 
with reproof and reproach and dictatorial command. 
The monster was now so big that it seems it was im- 
possible for any one to remember he was after all 
only a child of seven, with all a child’s desire for 
notice and amusement and fresh experience, with all 
a child’s craving for response, attention and affection, 
and all a child’s capacity for dependence and unre- 
stricted dulness and misery. 

The Vicar, walking down the village road some 
sunlit morning, would encounter an ungainly eighteen 
feet of the Inexplicable, as fantastic and unpleasant 
to him as some new form of Dissent, as it padded fit- 
fully along with craning neck, seeking, always seeking 
the two primary needs of childhood, something to 
eat and something with which to play. 

There would come a look of furtive respect into 
the creature’s eyes and an attempt to touch the 
matted forelock. 

In a limited way the Vicar had an imagination — 
at any rate, the remains of one — and with young Cad- 
dies it took the line of developing the huge possibili- 
ties of personal injury s ’.ch vast muscles must possess. 
Suppose a sudden madness — ! Suppose a mere 
lapse into disrespect — ! However, the truly brave 
man is not the man who does not feel fear but the 
man who overcomes it. Every time and always the 


CH. II 


THE BRAT GIGANTIC 


191 


Vicar got his imagination under. And he used al- 
ways to address young Caddies stoutly in a good 
clear service tenor. 

“Being a good boy, Albert Edward ?” 

And the young giant, edging closer to the wall and 
blushing deeply, would answer, “Yessir — trying.” 

“Mind you do,” said the Vicar and would go past 
him with at most a slight acceleration of his breath- 
ing. And out of respect for his manhood he made 
it a rule, whatever he might fancy, never to look back 
at the danger, when once it was passed. 

In a fitful manner the Vicar would give young 
Caddies private tuition. He never taught the mon- 
ster to read — it was not needed — but he taught him 
the more important points of the Catechism, his duty 
to his neighbour for example, and of that Deity who 
would punish Caddies with extreme vindictiveness if 
ever he ventured to disobey the Vicar and Lady Won- 
dershoot. The lessons would go on in the Vicar’s 
yard, and passers-by would hear that great cranky 
childish voice droning out the essential teachings of 
the Established Church. 

“To onner ’n ’bey the King and allooer put ’nthor- 
ity under ’im. To s’bmit meself tall my gov’ners, 
teachers, spir’shall pastors an’ masters. To order 
myself lowly ’n rev’rently t’r ’4 my betters ” 

Presently it became evident that the effect of the 
growing giant on unaccustomed horses was like that 
of a camel, and he was told to keep off the high road, 
not only near the shrubbery (where the oafish smile 


i 9 2 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. n 

over the wall had exasperated her ladyship ex- 
tremely), but altogether. That law he never com- 
pletely obeyed, because of the vast interest the 
high road had for him. But it turned what had 
been his constant resort into a stolen pleasure. He 
was limited at last almost entirely to old pasture and 
the Downs. 

I do not know what he would have done if it had 
not been for the Downs. There there were spaces 
where he might wander for miles, and over these 
spaces he wandered. He would pick branches from 
trees and make insane vast nosegays there until he 
was forbidden, take up sheep and put them in neat 
rows, from which they immediately wandered (at 
this he invariably laughed very heartily) until he was 
forbidden, dig away the turf, great wanton holes, 
until he was forbidden. . . . 

He would wander over the Downs as far as the 
hill above Wreckstone, but not further, because there 
he came upon cultivated land, and the people by rea- 
son of his depredations upon their root crops, and in- 
spired moreover by a sort of hostile timidity his big 
unkempt appearance frequently evoked, always came 
out against him with yapping dogs to drive him 
away. They would threaten him and lash at him 
with cart whips. I have heard that they would some- 
times fire at him with shotguns. And in the other 
direction he ranged within sight of Hickleybrow. 
From above Thursley Hanger he could get a glimpse 
of the London, Chatham, and Dover railway, but 


THE BRAT GIGANTIC 


CH. II 


1 93 


ploughed fields and a suspicious hamlet prevented his 
nearer access. 

And after a time there came boards, great boards 
with red letters that debarred him every direction. 
He could not read what the letters said: “Out of 
Bounds,” but in a little while he understood. He 
was often to be seen in those days, by the railway pas- 
sengers, sitting, chin on knees, perched up on the 
Down hard by the Thursley chalk pits, where after- 
wards he was set working. The train seemed to in- 
spire a dim emotion of friendliness in him, and some- 
times he would wave an enormous hand at it, and 
sometimes give it a rustic incoherent hail. 

“Big,” the peering passenger would say. “One of 
these Boom children. They say, Sir, quite unable to 
do anything for itself — little better than an idiot in 
fact, and a great burden on the locality.” 

“Parents quite poor, I’m told.” 

“Lives on the charity of the local gentry.” 

Every one would stare intelligently at that distant 
squatting monstrous figure for a space. 

“Good thing that was put a stop to,” some spacious 
thinking mind would suggest. “Nice to ’ave a few 
thousand of them on the rates, eh?” 

And usually there was some one wise enough to tail 
this philosopher: “You’re about Right there, Sir,” in 
hearty tones. 


194 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


II 


He had his bad days. 

There was, for example, that trouble with the 
river. 

He made little boats out of whole newspapers, an 
art he learnt by watching the Spender boy, and he 
set them sailing down the stream, great paper cocked 
hats. When they vanished under the bridge which 
marks the boundary of the strictly private grounds 
about Eyebright House, he would give a great shout 
and run round and across Tormat’s new field — Lord! 
how Tormat’s pigs did scamper to be sure, and turn 
their good fat into lean muscle ! — and so to meet his 
boats by the ford. Right across the nearer lawns 
these paper boats of his used to go, right in front of 
Eyebright House, right under Lady Wondershoot’s 
eyes! Disorganising folded newspapers! A pretty 
thing ! 

Gathering enterprise from impunity, he began 
babyish hydraulic engineering. He delved a huge 
port for his paper fleets with an old shed door that 
served him as a spade, and, no one chancing to ob- 
serve his operations just then, he devised an ingenious 
canal that incidentally flooded Lady Wondershoot’s 
ice-house, and finally he dammed the river. He 
dammed it right across with a few vigorous doorfuls 
of earth — he must have worked like an avalanche — 
and down came a most amazing spate through the 


CH. II 


THE BRAT GIGANTIC 


x 95 


shrubbery and washed away Miss Spinks and her 
easel and the most promising water-colour sketch she 
had ever begun, or, at any rate, it washed away her 
easel and left her wet to the knees and dismally 
tucked up in flight to the house, and thence the waters 
rushed through the kitchen garden and so by the 
green door into the lane and down into the river bed 
again by Short’s ditch. 

Meanwhile, the Vicar, interrupted in conversation 
with the blacksmith, was amazed to see distressful 
stranded fish leaping out of a few residual pools, and 
heaped green weed in the bed of the stream where 
ten minutes before there had been eight feet and more 
of clear cool water. 

After that, horrified at his own consequences, 
young Caddies fled his home for two days and nights. 
He returned only at the insistent call of hunger, to 
bear with stoical calm an amount of violent scolding 
that was more in proportion to his size than anything 
else that had ever before fallen to his lot in the 
Happy Village. 


Ill 

Immediately after that affair Lady Wondershoot, 
casting about for exemplary additions to the abuse 
and fastings she had inflicted, issued a Ukase. She 
issued it first to her butler and very suddenly, so that 
she made him jump. He was clearing away the 
breakfast things and she was staring out of the tall 


1 96 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 

window on the terrace where the fawns would come 
to be fed. “Jobbet,” she said, in her most im- 
perial voice, “Jobbet, this Thing must work for its 
living.” 

And she made it quite clear not only to Jobbet 
(which was easy) , but to every one else in the village, 
including young Caddies, that in this matter, as in 
all things, she meant what she said. 

“Keep him employed,” said Lady Wondershoot. 
“That’s the tip for Master Caddies.” 

“It’s the Tip, I fancy, for all Humanity,” said the 
Vicar. “The simple duties, the modest round, seed- 
time and harvest ” 

“Exactly,” said Lady Wondershoot. “What / 
always say. Satan finds some mischief still for idle 
hands to do. At any rate among the labouring 
classes. We bring up our under-housemaids on 
that principle, always. What shall we set him to 
do?” 

That was a little difficult. They thought of many 
things, and meanwhile they broke him in to labour a 
bit by using him instead of a horse messenger to 
carry telegrams and notes when extra speed was 
needed, and he also carried luggage and packing- 
cases and things of that sort very conveniently in a 
big net they found for him. He seemed to like em- 
ployment, regarding it as a sort of game, and Kinkle, 
Lady Wondershoot’s agent, seeing him shift a rock- 
ery for her one day, was struck by the brilliant idea 
of putting him into her chalk quarry at Thursley 


CH. II 


THE BRAT GIGANTIC 


! 9 7 


Hanger hard by Hickleybrow. This idea was 
carried out, and it seemed they had settled his 
problem. 

He worked in the chalk pit, at first with the zest of 
a playing child, and afterwards with an effect of 
habit, delving, loading, doing all the haulage of the 
trucks, running the full ones down the lines towards 
the siding, and hauling the empty ones up by the 
wire of a great windlass : working the entire quarry 
at last single-handed. 

I am told that Kinkle made a very good thing in- 
deed out of him for Lady Wondershoot, consuming 
as he did scarcely anything but his food, though that 
never restrained her denunciation of “the Creature” 
as a gigantic parasite upon her charity. 

At that time he used to wear a sort of smock of 
sacking, trousers of patched leather, and iron-shod 
sabots. Over his head was sometimes a queer thing, 
a worn-out beehive straw chair it was, but usually he 
went bareheaded. He would be moving about the 
pit with a powerful deliberation, and the Vicar on 
his constitutional round would get there about mid- 
day to find him shamefully eating his vast need of 
food with his back to all the world. 

His food was brought to him every day, a mess 
of grain in the husk, in a truck, a small railway truck, 
like one of the trucks he was perpetually filling with 
chalk, and this load he used to char in an old lime 
kiln and then devour. Sometimes he would mix with 
it a bag of sugar. Sometimes he would sit licking a 


198 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 

lump of such salt as is given to cows, or eating a huge 
lump of dates, stones and all, such as one sees in Lon- 
don on barrows. For drink he walked to the rivulet 
beyond the burnt-out site of the Experimental Farm 
at Hickleybrow and put down his face to the stream. 
It was from his drinking in that way after eating that 
the Food of the Gods did at last get loose, spreading 
first of all in huge weeds from the river-side, then in 
big frogs, bigger trout and stranding carp, and at last 
in a fantastic exuberance of vegetation all over the 
little valley. 

And after a year or so the queer monstrous grub 
things in the field before the blacksmith’s grew so 
big and developed into such frightful skipjacks and 
cockchafers — motor cockchafers the boys called them 
— that they drove Lady Wondershoot abroad. 

IV 

But soon the Food was to enter upon a new phase 
of its work in him. In spite of the simple instructions 
of the Vicar, instructions intended to round off the 
modest natural life befitting a giant peasant, in the 
most complete and final manner, he began to ask 
questions, to inquire into things, to think. As he 
grew from boyhood to adolescence it became increas- 
ingly evident that his mind had processes of its own 
— out of the Vicar’s control. The Vicar did his best 
to ignore this distressing phenomenon, but still — he 
could feel it there. 


CH. II 


THE BRAT GIGANTIC 


199 


The young giant’s material for thought lay about 
him. Quite involuntarily, with his spacious views, 
his constant overlooking of things, he must have seen 
a good deal of human life, and as it grew clearer to 
him that he too, save for this clumsy greatness of his, 
was also human, he must have come to realise more 
and more just how much was shut against him by his 
melancholy distinction. The sociable hum of the 
school, the mystery of religion that was partaken in 
such finery, and which exhaled so sweet a strain of 
melody, the jovial chorusing from the Inn, the 
warmly glowing rooms, candle-lit and fire-lit, into 
which he peered out of the darkness, or again the 
shouting excitement, the vigour of flannelled exercise 
upon some imperfectly understood issue that centred 
about the cricket-field, all these things must have cried 
aloud to his companionable heart. It would seem 
that as his adolescence crept upon him, he began to 
take a very considerable interest in the proceedings of 
lovers, in those preferences and pairings, those close 
intimacies that are so cardinal in life. 

One Sunday, just about that hour when the stars 
and the bats and the passions of rural life come out, 
there chanced to be a young couple “kissing each 
other a bit” in Love Lane, the deep hedged lane that 
runs out back towards the Upper Lodge. They were 
giving their little emotions play, as secure in the 
warm still twilight as any lovers could be. The only 
conceivable interruption they thought possible must 
come pacing visibly up the lane; the twelve-foot 


200 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


hedge towards the silent Downs seemed to them an 
absolute guarantee. 

Then suddenly — incredibly — they were lifted and 
drawn apart. 

They discovered themselves held up, each with a 
finger and thumb under the armpits, and with the 
perplexed brown eyes of young Caddies scanning 
their warm flushed faces. They were naturally dumb 
with the emotions of their situation. 

“Why do you like doing that?” asked young Cad- 
dies. 

I gather the embarrassment continued until the 
swain, remembering his manhood, vehemently, with 
loud shouts, threats, and virile blasphemies, such as 
became the occasion, bade young Caddies under pen- 
alties put them down. Whereupon young Caddies, 
remembering his manners, did put them down po- 
litely and very carefully, and conveniently near for 
a resumption of their embraces, and having hesitated 
above them for a while, vanished again into the twi- 
light. . . . 

“But I felt precious silly,” the swain confided to 
me. “We couldn’t ’ardly look at one another. Bein’ 
caught like that. 

“Kissing we was — you know. 

“And the cur’ous thing is, she blamed it all on to 
me,” said the swain. 

“Flew out something outrageous, and wouldn’t 
’ardly speak to me all the way ’ome. . . .” 

The giant was embarking upon investigations, 


CH. II 


THE BRAT GIGANTIC 


201 


there could be no doubt. His mind, it became mani- 
fest, was throwing up questions. He put them to few 
people as yet, but they troubled him. His mother, 
one gathers, sometimes came in for cross-examina- 
tion. 

He used to come into the yard behind his mother’s 
cottage, and, after a careful inspection of the ground 
for hens and chicks, he would sit down slowly with 
his back against the barn. In a minute the chicks, 
who liked him, would be pecking all over him at the 
mossy chalk mud in the seams of his clothing, and if 
it was blowing up for wet, Mrs. Caddies’ kitten, who 
never lost her confidence in him, would assume a sin- 
uous form and start scampering into the cottage, up 
to the kitchen fender, round, out, up his leg, up his 
body, right up to his shoulder, meditative moment, 
and then scat! back again, and so on. Sometimes 
she would stick her claws in his face out of sheer 
gaiety of heart, but he never dared to touch her be- 
cause of the uncertain weight of his hand upon a 
creature so frail. Besides, he rather liked to be 
tickled. And after a time he would put some clumsy 
questions to his mother. 

“Mother,” he would say, “if it’s good to work, 
why doesn’t every one work?” 

His mother would look up at him and answer, “It’s 
good for the likes of us.” 

He would meditate, “ Why ?” 

And going unanswered, “What’s work for, 
mother? Why do I cut chalk and you wash clothes, 


202 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


day after day, while Lady Wondershoot goes about 
in her carriage, mother, and travels off to those beau- 
tiful foreign countries you and I mustn’t see, 
mother?” 

“She’s a lady,” said Mrs. Caddies. 

“Oh,” said young Caddies, and meditated pro- 
foundly. 

“If there wasn’t gentlefolks to make work for us 
to do,” said Mrs. Caddies, “how should we poor peo- 
ple get a living?” 

This had to be digested. 

“Mother,” he tried again; “if there wasn’t any 
gentlefolks, wouldn’t things belong to people like me 
and you, and if they did ” 

“Lord sakes and drat the Boy!” Mrs. Caddies 
would say — she had with the help of a good memory 
become quite a florid and vigorous individuality since 
Mrs. Skinner died. “Since your poor dear grandma 
was took, there’s no abiding you. Don’t you arst no 
questions and you won’t be told no lies. If once I 
was to start out answerin’ you serious, y’r father’d 
’ave to go and arst some one else for ’is supper — let 
alone finishin’ the washin’.” 

“All right, mother,” he would say, after a won- 
dering stare at her. “I didn’t mean to worry.” 

And he would go on thinking. 


CH. II 


THE BRAT GIGANTIC 


203 


V 

He was thinking too four years after, when the 
Vicar, now no longer ripe but over-ripe, saw him for 
the last time of all. You figure the old gentleman 
visibly a little older now, slacker in his girth, a little 
coarsened and a little weakened in his thought and 
speech, with a quivering shakiness in his hand and a 
quivering shakiness in his convictions, but his eye still 
bright and merry for all the trouble the Food had 
caused his village and himself. He had been fright- 
ened at times and disturbed, but was he not alive still 
and the same still? — and fifteen long years, a fair 
sample of eternity — had turned the trouble into use 
and wont. 

“It was a disturbance, I admit,” he would say, 
“and things are different. Different in many ways. 
There was a time when a boy could weed, but now a 
man must go out with axe and crowbar — in some 
places down by the thickets at least. And it’s a little 
strange still to us old-fashioned people for all this 
valley, even what used to be the river bed before they 
irrigated, to be under wheat — as it is this year — 
twenty-five feet high. They used the old-fashioned 
scythe here twenty years ago, and they would bring 
home the harvest on a wain — rejoicing — in a simple 
honest fashion. A little simple drunkenness, a little 
frank love-making, to conclude. . . . Poor 

dear Lady Wondershoot — she didn’t like these inno- 


<204 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 

vations. Very conservative, poor dear lady! A 
touch of the eighteenth century about her, I always 
said. Her language for example. . . . Bluff 

vigour. . 

“She died comparatively poor. These big weeds 
got into her garden. She was not one of these gar- 
dening women, but she liked her garden in order — 
things growing where they were planted and as they 
were planted — under control. . . . The way 

things grew was unexpected — upset her ideas. . . . 
She didn’t like the perpetual invasion of this young 
monster — at least she began to fancy he was always 
gaping at her over her wall. . . . She didn’t 

like his being nearly as high as her house. 

Jarred with her sense of proportion. Poor dear lady ! 
I had hoped she would last my time. It was the big 
cockchafers we had for a year or so that decided her. 
They came from the giant larvae — nasty things as 
big as rats — in the valley turf. . . 

“And the ants no doubt weighed with her also. 

“Since everything was upset and there was no 
peace and quietness anywhere now, she said she 
thought she might just as well be at Monte Carlo as 
anywhere else. And she went. 

“She played pretty boldly, I’m told. Died in an 
hotel there. Very sad end. . . . Exile. . . . 

Not — not what one considers meet. ... A 
natural leader of our English people. . . . Up- 
rooted. So ! . . . 

“Yet after all,” harped the Vicar, “it comes to 
very little. A nuisance of course. Children cannot 


CH. II 


THE BRAT GIGANTIC 


205 


run about so freely as they used to do, what with ant 
bites and so forth. Perhaps it’s as well. . . . 

There used to be talk — as though this stuff would 
revolutionise everything. . . . But there is 

something that defies all these forces of the New. 

I don’t know of course. I’m not one of 
your modern philosophers — explain everything with 
ether and atoms. Evolution. Rubbish like that. 
What I mean is something the ’Ologies don’t include. 
Matter of reason — not understanding. Ripe wis- 
dom. Human nature. A ere perennius. . . . 
Call it what you will.” 

And so at last it came to the last time. 

The Vicar had no intimation of what lay so close 
upon him. He did his customary walk, over by 
Farthing Down, as he had done it for more than a 
score of years, and so to the place whence he would 
watch young Caddies. He did the rise over by the 
chalk pit crest a little puffily — he had long since lost 
the Muscular Christian stride of early days — but 
Caddies was not at his work, and then, as he skirted 
the thicket of giant bracken that was beginning to 
obscure and overshadow the Hanger, he came upon 
the monster’s huge form seated on the hill — brooding 
as it were upon the world. Caddies’ knees were 
drawn up, his cheek was on his hand, his head a little 
aslant. He sat with his shoulder towards the Vicar, 
so that those perplexed eyes could not be seen. He 
must have been thinking very intently, at any rate 
he was sitting very still. . . . 

He never turned round. He never knew that the 


20 6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. ii 


Vicar, who had played so large a part in shaping his 
life, looked then at him for the very last of innumer- 
able times — did not know even that he was there. 
(So it is so many partings happen.) The Vicar was 
struck at the time by the fact that, after all, no one on 
earth had the slightest idea of what this great mon- 
ster thought about when he saw fit to rest from his 
labours. But he was too indolent to follow up that 
new theme that day ; he fell back from its suggestion 
into his older grooves of thought. 

“A ere perennius” he whispered, walking slowly 
homeward by a path that no longer ran straight 
athwart the turf after its former fashion, but wound 
circuitously to avoid new sprung tussocks of giant 
grass. “No ! nothing is changed. Dimensions are 
nothing. The simple round, the common way ” 

And that night, quite painlessly, and all unknow- 
ing, he himself went the common way — out of this 
Mystery of Change he had spent his life in denying. 

They buried him in the churchyard of Cheasing 
Eyebright, near to the largest yew, and the modest 
tombstone bearing his epitaph — it ended with: JJtin 
Principio, nunc est et semper — was almost immedi- 
ately hidden from the eye of man by a spread of 
giant grey tasselled grass too stout for scythe or 
sheep, that came sweeping like a fog over the village 
out of the germinating moisture of the valley mead- 
ows in which the Food of the Gods had been 
working. 


BOOK III 

THE HARVEST OF THE FOOD 


207 










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CHAPTER THE FIRST 


THE ALTERED WORLD 

I 

Change played in its new fashion with the world 
for twenty years. To most men the new things came 
little by little and day by day, remarkably enough, 
but not so abruptly as to overwhelm. But to one man 
at least the full accumulation of those two decades of 
the Food’s work was to be revealed suddenly and 
amazingly in one day. For our purpose it is conven- 
ient to take him for that one day and to tell some- 
thing of the things he saw. 

This man was a convict, a prisoner for life — his 
crime is no concern of ours — whom the law saw fit to 
pardon after twenty years. One summer morning 
this poor wretch, who had left the world a young 
man of three and twenty, found himself thrust out 
again from the grey simplicity of toil and discipline, 
that had become his life, into a dazzling freedom. 
They had put unaccustomed clothes upon him; his 
hair had been growing for some weeks, and he had 
parted it now for some days, and there he stood, in 
a sort of shabby and clumsy newness of body and 
mind, blinking with his eyes and blinking indeed with 
209 


210 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


his soul, outside again, trying to realise one incredible 
thing, that after all he was again for a little while in 
the world of life, and for all other incredible things, 
totally unprepared. He was so fortunate as to have 
a brother who cared enough for their distant com- 
mon memories to come and meet him and clasp his 
hand, a brother he had left a little lad and who was 
now a bearded prosperous man — whose very eyes 
were unfamiliar. And together he and this stranger 
from his kindred came down into the town of Dover, 
saying little to one another and feeling many things. 

They sat for a space in a public-house, the one an- 
swering the questions of the other about this person 
and that, reviving queer old points of view, brushing 
aside endless new aspects and new perspectives, and 
then it was time to go to the station and take the Lon- 
don train. Their names and the personal things they 
had to talk of do not matter to our story, but only 
the changes and all the strangeness that this poor re- 
turning soul found in the once familiar world. 

In Dover itself he remarked little except the good- 
ness of beer from pewter — never before had there 
been such a draught of beer, and it brought tears of 
gratitude to his eyes. “Beer’s as good as ever,” said 
he, believing it infinitely better. 

It was only as the train rattled them past Folke- 
stone that he could look out beyond his more imme- 
diate emotions, to see what had happened to the 
world. He peered out of the window. “It’s sunny,” 
he said for the twelfth time. “I couldn’t ha’ had bet- 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


21 I 


ter weather.” And then for the first time it dawned 
upon him that there were novel disproportions in the 
world. “Lord sakes,” he cried, sitting up and look- 
ing animated for the first time, “but them’s mortal 
great thissels growing out there on the bank by that 
broom. If so be they be thissels? Or ’ave I been 
forgetting?” 

But they were thistles, and what he took for tall 
bushes of broom was the new grass, and amidst these 
things a company of British soldiers — red-coated as 
ever — was skirmishing in accordance with the direc- 
tions of the drill book that had been partially revised 
after the Boer War. Then whack! into a tunnel, and 
then into Sandling Junction, which was now em- 
bedded and dark — its lamps were all alight — in a 
great thicket of rhododendron that had crept out of 
some adjacent gardens and grown enormously up the 
valley. There was a train of trucks on the Sand- 
gate siding piled high with rhododendron logs, and 
here it was the returning citizen heard first of Boom- 
food. 

As they sped out into a country again that seemed 
absolutely unchanged, the two brothers were hard at 
their explanations. The one was full of eager, dull 
questions, the other had never thought, had never 
troubled to see the thing as a single fact, and he was 
allusive and difficult to follow. “It’s this here Boom- 
food stuff,” he said, touching his bottom rock of 
knowledge. “Don’t you know? ’Aven’t they told 
you, any of ’em? Boomfood! You know — Boom- 


212 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


food. What all the election’s about. Scientific sort 
of stuff. ’Asn’t no one ever told you?” 

He thought prison had made his brother a fearful 
duffer not to know that. 

They made wide shots at each other by way of 
question and answer. Between these scraps of talk 
were intervals of window gazing. At first the man’s 
interest in things was vague and general. His imag- 
ination had been busy with what old so and so would 
say, how so and so would look, how he would say to 
all and sundry certain things that would present his 
“putting away” in a mitigated light. This Boomfood 
came in at first as it were a thing in an odd paragraph 
of the newspapers, then as a source of intellectual dif- 
ficulty with his brother. But it came to him presently 
that Boomfood was persistently coming in upon any 
topic he began. 

In those days the world was a patchwork of transi- 
tion, so that this great new fact came to him in a 
series of shocks of contrast. The process of change 
had not been uniform ; it had spread from one centre 
of distribution here and another centre there. The 
country was in patches : great areas where the Food 
was still to come, and areas where it was already in 
the soil and in the air, sporadic and contagious. It 
was a bold new motif creeping in among ancient and 
venerable airs. 

The contrast was very vivid indeed along the line 
from Dover to London at that time. For a space 
they traversed just such a countryside as he had 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


213 


known since his childhood, the small oblongs of field, 
hedge-lined, of a size for pigmy horses to plough, the 
little roads three cart widths wide, the elms and 
oaks and poplars dotting these fields about, little 
thickets of willow beside the streams, ricks of hay no 
higher than a giant’s knees, dolls’ cottages with dia- 
mond panes, brickfields, and straggling village 
streets, the larger houses of the petty great, flower- 
grown railway banks, garden-set stations, and all the 
little things of the vanished, nineteenth century still 
holding out against Immensity. Here and there 
would be a patch of wind-sown, wind-tattered giant 
thistle defying the axe ; here and there a ten-foot puff- 
ball or the ashen stems of some burnt-out patch of 
monster grass; but that was all there was to hint at 
the coming of the Food. 

For a couple of score of miles there was nothing 
else to foreshadow in any way the strange bigness of 
the wheat and of the weeds that were hidden from 
him not a dozen miles from his route just over the 
hills in the Cheasing Eyebright valley. And then 
presently, the traces of the Food would begin. The 
first striking thing was the great new viaduct at Ton- 
bridge, where the swamp of the choked Medway 
(due to a giant variety of Char a) began in those 
days. Then again the little country, and then, as the 
petty multitudinous immensity of London spread out 
under its haze, the traces of man’s fight to keep out 
greatness became abundant and incessant. 

In that south-eastern region of London at that 


214 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


time, and all about where Cossar and his children 
lived, the Food had become mysteriously insurgent at 
a hundred points; the little life went on amidst daily 
portents that only the deliberation of their increase, 
the slow parallel growth of usage to their presence, 
had robbed of their warning. But this returning citi- 
zen peered out to see for the first time the facts of the 
Food strange and predominant, scarred and black- 
ened areas, big unsightly defences and preparations, 
barracks and arsenals that this subtle persistent influ- 
ence had forced into the life of men. 

Here on an ampler scale the experience of the first 
Experimental Farm had been repeated time and 
again. It had been in the inferior and accidental 
things of life — under foot and in waste places, irregu- 
larly and irrelevantly — that the coming of a new 
force and new issues had first declared itself. There 
were great evil-smelling yards and enclosures where 
some invincible jungle of weed furnished fuel for gi- 
gantic machinery (little cockneys came to stare at its 
clangorous oiliness and tip the men a sixpence) ; there 
were roads and tracks for big motors and vehicles, 
roads made of the interwoven fibres of hypertrophied 
hemp ; there were towers containing steam sirens that 
could yell at once and warn the world against any 
new insurgence of vermin, or, what was queerer, ven- 
erable church towers conspicuously fitted with a me- 
chanical scream. There were little red painted refuge 
huts and garrison shelters, each with its 300-yard 
rifle range, where the riflemen practised daily with 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


Cli. I 


215 


soft-nosed ammunition at targets in the shape of mon- 
strous rats. 

Six times since the day of the Skinners there had 
been outbreaks of giant rats — each time from the 
south-west London sewers, and now they were as 
much an accepted fact there as tigers in the delta by 
Calcutta. 

The man’s brother had bought a paper in a heed- 
less sort of way at Sandling, and at last this chanced 
to catch the eye of the released man. He opened the 
unfamiliar sheets — they seemed to him to be smaller, 
more numerous, and different in type from the papers 
of the times before — and he found himself con- 
fronted with innumerable pictures about things so 
strange as to be uninteresting, and with tall columns 
of printed matter whose headings, for the most part, 
were as unmeaning as though they had been written 
in a foreign tongue — “Great Speech by Mr. Cater- 
ham;” “The Boomfood Laws.” 

“Who’s this here Caterham?” he asked, in an at- 
tempt to make conversation. 

“ He’s all right,” said his brother. 

“Ah! Sort of politician, eh?” 

“Goin’ to turn out the Government. Jolly well 
time he did.” 

“Ah!” He reflected. “I suppose all the lot I 
used to know, Chamberlain, Rosebery, all that lot — 
What r 

His brother had grasped his wrist and pointed out 
of the window. 


21 6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


“That’s the Cossars!” The eyes of the released 
prisoner followed the finger’s direction and saw 

“My Gawd!” he cried, for the first time really 
overcome with amazement. The paper dropped into 
final forgottenness between his feet. Through the 
trees he could see very distinctly, standing in an easy 
attitude, the legs wide apart and the hand grasping 
a ball as if about to throw it, a gigantic human figure 
a good forty feet high. The figure glittered in the 
sunlight, clad in a suit of woven white metal and 
belted with a broad belt of steel. For a moment it 
focussed all attention, and then the eye was wrested 
to another more distant Giant who stood prepared to 
catch, and it became apparent that the whole area of 
that great bay in the hills just north of Sevenoaks had 
been scarred to gigantic ends. 

A hugely banked entrenchment overhung the chalk 
pit, in which stood the house, a monstrous squat 
Egyptian shape that Cossar had built for his sons 
when the Giant Nursery had served its turn, and be- 
hind was a great dark shed that might have covered a 
cathedral, in which a spluttering incandescence came 
and went, and from out of which came a Titanic ham- 
mering to beat upon the ear. Then the attention 
leapt back to the giant as the great ball of iron-bound 
timber soared up out of his hand. 

The two men stood up and stared. The ball 
seemed as big as a cask. 

“Caught!” cried the man from prison, as a tree 
blotted out the thrower. 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


217 


The train looked on these things only for the frac- 
tion of a minute and then passed behind trees into the 
Chiselhurst tunnel. “My Gawd !” said the man from 
prison again as the darkness closed about them. 
“Why! that chap was as ’igh as a ’ouse.” 

“That’s them young Cossars,” said his brother, 
jerking his head allusively, “what all this trouble’s 
about. . . .” 

They emerged again to discover more siren sur- 
mounted towers, more red huts, and then the cluster- 
ing villas of the outer suburbs. The art of bill-stick- 
ing had lost nothing in the interval, and from count- 
less tall hoardings, from house ends, from palings, 
and a hundred such points of vantage came the poly- 
chromatic appeals of the great Boomfood election. 
“Caterham,” “Boomfood,” and “Jack the Giant- 
killer” again and again and again, and monstrous 
caricatures and distortions, a hundred varieties of 
misrepresentations of those great and shining figures 
they had passed so nearly only a few minutes be- 
fore. . . . 


II 

It had been the purpose of the younger brother to 
do a very magnificent thing, to celebrate this return 
to life by a dinner at some restaurant of indisputable 
quality, a dinner that should be followed by all that 
glittering succession of impressions the Music Halls 
of those days were so capable of giving. It was a 


21 8 the DAWN OF THE FOOD bk.iii 


worthy plan to wipe off the more superficial stains of 
the prison house by this display of free indulgence; 
but so far as the second item went the plan was 
changed. The dinner stood, but there was a desire 
already more powerful than the appetite for shows, 
already more efficient in turning the man’s mind 
away from his grim prepossession with his past than 
any theatre could be, and that was an enormous curi- 
osity and perplexity about this Boomfood and these 
Boom children, this new portentous giantry that 
seemed to dominate the world. “I ’aven’t the ’ang of 
’em,” he said. “They disturve me.” 

His brother had that fineness of mind that can 
even set aside a contemplated hospitality. “It’s your 
evening, dear old boy,” he said. “We’ll try to get 
into the mass meeting at the People’s Palace.” 

And at last the man from prison had the luck to 
find himself wedged into a packed multitude and star- 
ing from afar at a little brightly lit platform under 
an organ and a gallery. The organ had been playing 
something that had set boots tramping as the people 
swarmed in ; but that was over now. 

Hardly had the man from prison settled into 
place and done his quarrel with an importunate 
stranger who elbowed, before Caterham came. He 
walked out of a shadow towards the middle of the 
platform, the most insignificant little pigmy, away 
there in the distance, a little black figure with a pink 
dab for a face — in profile one saw his quite distinc- 
tive aquiline nose — a little figure that trailed after it 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


219 


most inexplicably — a cheer. A cheer it was that be- 
gan away there and grew and spread. A little splut- 
tering of voices about the platform at first that sud- 
denly leapt up into a flame of sound and swept 
athwart the whole mass of humanity within the 
building and without. How they cheered ! Hooray ! 
Hoo-ray ! 

No one in all those myriads cheered like the man 
from prison. The tears poured down his face, and 
he only stopped cheering at last because the thing had 
choked him. You must have been in prison as long 
as he before you can understand, or even begin to 
understand, what it means to a man to let his lungs 
go in a crowd. (But for all that he did not even 
pretend to himself that he knew what all this emotion 
was about.) Hooray! OGod! — Hoo-ray! 

And then a sort of silence. Caterham had sub- 
sided to a conspicuous patience, and subordinate and 
inaudible persons were saying and doing formal and 
insignificant things. It was like hearing voices 
through the noise of leaves in spring. “Wawawa- 
wa — ” What did it matter? People in the audi- 
ence talked to one another. “Wawawawawa — ” the 
thing went on. Would that grey-headed duffer 
never have done? Interrupting? Of course they 
were interrupting. “Wa, wa, wa, wa — ” But shall 
we hear Caterham any better? 

Meanwhile at any rate there was Caterham to 
stare at, and one could stand and study the distant 
prospect of the great man’s features. He was easy 


220 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 


to draw was this man, and already the world had him 
to study at leisure on lamp chimneys and children’s 
plates, on Anti-Boomfood medals and Anti-Boom- 
food flags, on the selvedges of Caterham silks and 
cottons and in the linings of Good Old English Ca- 
terham hats. He pervades all the caricature of that 
time. One sees him as a sailor standing to an old- 
fashioned gun, a port-fire labelled “New Boomford 
Laws” in his hand; while in the sea wallows that 
huge ugly threatening monster, “Boomfood;” or he 
is cap-a-pie in armour, St. George’s cross on shield 
and helm, and a cowardly titanic Caliban sitting 
amidst desecrations at the mouth of a horrid cave 
declines his gauntlet of the “New Boomfood Regula- 
tions;” or he comes flying down as Perseus and res- 
cues a chained and beautiful Andromeda (labelled 
distinctly about her belt as “Civilisation”) from a 
wallowing waste of sea monster bearing upon its va- 
rious necks and claws “Irreligion,” “Trampling Ego- 
tism,” “Mechanism,” “Monstrosity,” and the like. 
But it was as “Jack the Giant-killer” that the popu- 
lar imagination considered Caterham most correctly 
cast, and it was in the vein of a Jack the Giant-killer 
poster that the man from prison enlarged that distant 
miniature. 

The “Wawawawa” came abruptly to an end. 

He’s done. He’s sitting down. Yes! No! Yes! 
It’s Caterham! “Caterham!” “Caterham!” And 
then came the cheers. 

It takes a multitude to make such a stillness as fol- 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


221 


lowed that disorder of cheering. A man alone in a 
wilderness — it’s stillness of a sort no doubt, but he 
hears himself breathe, he hears himself move, he 
hears all sorts of things. Here the voice of Cater- 
ham was the one single thing heard, a thing very 
bright and clear, like a little light burning in a black 
velvet recess. Hear indeed! One heard him as 
though he spoke at one’s elbow. 

It was stupendously effective to the man from 
prison, that gesticulating little figure in a halo of 
light, in a halo of rich and swaying sounds; behind 
it, partially effaced as it were, sat its supporters on 
the platform, and in the foreground was a wide per- 
spective of innumerable backs and profiles, a vast 
multitudinous attention. That little figure seemed to 
have absorbed the substance from them all. 

Caterham spoke of our ancient institutions. “Ear- 
earear,” roared the crowd. “Ear! ear!” said the 
man from prison. He spoke of our ancient spirit of 
order and justice. “Earearear!” roared the crowd. 
“Ear! Ear!” cried the man from prison, deeply 
moved. He spoke of the wisdom of our forefathers, 
of the slow growth of venerable institutions, of moral 
and social traditions, that fitted our English national 
characteristics as the skin fits the hand. “Ear ! Ear !” 
groaned the man from prison, with tears of excite- 
ment on his cheeks. And now all these things were 
to go into the melting pot. Yes, into the melting 
pot ! Because three men in London twenty years ago 
had seen fit to mix something indescribable in a bot- 


222 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


tie, all the order and sanctity of things — Cries of 
“No! No!” — Well, if it was not to be so, they must 
exert themselves, they must say good-bye to hesita- 
tion — Here there came a gust of cheering. They 
must say good-bye to hesitation and half measures. 

“We have heard, gentlemen,” cried Caterham, “of 
nettles that become giant nettles. At first they are 
no more than other nettles, little plants that a firm 
hand may grasp and wrench away; but if you leave 
them — if you leave them, they grow with such a 
power of poisonous expansion that at last you must 
needs have axe and rope, you must needs have 
danger to life and limb, you must needs have toil and 
distress — men may be killed in their felling, men may 
be killed in their felling ” 

There came a stir and interruption and then the 
man from prison heard Caterham’s voice again, ring- 
ing clear and strong: “Learn about Boomfood from 
Boomfood itself and — ” He paused — “Grasp your 
nettle before it is too late! ,} 

He stopped and stood wiping his lips. “A crys- 
tal,” cried some one, “a crystal,” and then came that 
same strange swift growth to thunderous tumult, 
until the whole world seemed cheering. 

The man from prison came out of the hall at last, 
marvellously stirred, and with that in his face that 
marks those who have seen a vision. He knew, every 
one knew; his ideas were no longer vague. He had 
come back to a world in crisis, to the immediate de- 
cision of a stupendous issue. He must play his part 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


223 


in the great conflict like a man — like a free responsi- 
ble man. The antagonism presented itself as a pic- 
ture. On the one hand those easy gigantic mail- 
clad figures of the morning — one saw them now in a 
different light — on the other this little black-clad ges- 
ticulating creature under the limelight, that pigmy 
thing with its ordered flow of melodious persuasion, 
its little marvellously penetrating voice, John Cater- 
ham — “Jack the Giant-killer.” They must all unite 
to “grasp the nettle” before it was “too late.” 

Ill 

The tallest and strongest and most regarded of all 
the children of the Food were the three sons of Cos- 
sar. The mile or so of land near Sevenoaks in which 
their boyhood passed became so trenched, so dug out 
and twisted about, so covered with sheds and huge 
working models and all the play of their developing 
powers, it was like no other place on earth. And 
long since it had become too little for the things they 
sought to do. The eldest son was a mighty schemer 
of wheeled engines; he had made himself a sort of 
giant bicycle that no road in the world had room for, 
no bridge could bear. There it stood, a great thing 
of wheels and engines, capable of two hundred and 
fifty miles an hour, useless save that now and then he 
would mount it and fling himself backwards and for- 
wards across that cumbered work yard. He had 
meant to go around the little world with it; he had 


224 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

made it with that intention, while he was still no more 
than a dreaming boy. Now its spokes were rusted 
deep red like wounds, wherever the enamel had been 
chipped away. 

“You must make a road for it first, Sonnie,” Cos- 
sar had said, “before you can do that.” 

So one morning about dawn the young giant and 
his brothers had set to work to make a road about 
the world. They seem to have had an inkling of op- 
position impending, and they had worked with re- 
markable vigour. The world had discovered them 
soon enough, driving that road as straight as a flight 
of a bullet towards the English Channel, already 
some miles of it leveled and made and stamped hard. 
They had been stopped before midday by a vast 
crowd of excited people, owners of land, land agents, 
local authorities, lawyers, policemen, soldiers even. 

“We’re making a road,” the biggest boy had ex- 
plained. 

“Make a road by all means,” said the leading law- 
yer on the ground, “but please respect the rights of 
other people. You have already infringed the pri- 
vate rights of twenty-seven private proprietors; let 
alone the special privileges and property of an urban 
district board, nine parish councils, a county council, 
two gas works, and a railway company. . . .” 

“Goodney!” said the elder boy Cossar. 

“You will have to stop it.” 

“But don’t you want a nice straight road in the 
place of all these rotten rutty little lanes?” 


ch.i THE ALTERED WORLD 225 

“I won’t say it wouldn’t be advantageous, 
but ” 

“It isn’t to be done,” said the eldest Cossar boy, 
picking up his tools. 

“Not in this way,” said the lawyer, “certainly.” 

“How is it to be done?” 

The leading lawyer’s answer had been complicated 
and vague. 

Cossar had come down to see the mischief his chil- 
dren had done, and reproved them severely and 
laughed enormously and seemed to be extremely 
happy over the affair. “You boys must wait a bit,” 
he shouted up to them, “before you can do things like 
that.” 

“The lawyer told us we must begin by preparing 
a scheme, and getting special powers and all sorts of 
rot. Said it would take us years.” 

“ We’ll have a scheme before long, little boy,” 
cried Cossar, hands to his mouth as he shouted, 
“never fear. For a bit you’d better play about and 
make models of the things you want to do.” 

They did as he told them like obedient sons. 

But for all that the Cossar lads brooded a 
little. 

“It’s all very well,” said the second to the first, 
“but I don’t always want just to play about and plan. 
I want to do something real, you know. We didn’t 
come into this world so strong as we are, just to play 
about in this messy little bit of ground, you know, and 
take little walks and keep out of the towns” — for by 


226 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


that time they were forbidden all boroughs and urban 
districts. “Doing nothing’s just wicked. Can’t we 
find out something the little people want done and do 
it for them — just for the fun of doing it? 

“Lot’s of them haven’t houses fit to live in,” said 
the second boy. “Let’s go and build ’em a house 
close up to London that will hold heaps and heaps 
of them and be ever so comfortable and nice, and let’s 
make ’em a nice little road to where they all go and 
do business — a nice straight little road, and make it 
all as nice as nice. We’ll make it all so clean and 
pretty that they won’t any of them be able to live 
grubby and beastly like most of them do now. Water 
enough for them to wash with, we’ll have — you know 
they’re so dirty now that nine out of ten of their 
houses haven’t even baths in them, the filthy little 
skunks ! You know, the ones that have baths spit in- 
sults at the ones that haven’t, instead of helping them 
to get them — and call ’em the Great Unwashed. — 
You know. We’ll alter all that. And we’ll make 
electricity light and cook and clean up for them, and 
all. Fancy! They make their women — women who 
are going to be mothers — crawl about and scrub 
floors ! 

“We could make it all beautifully. We could 
bank up a valley in that range of hills over there and 
make a nice reservoir, and we could make a big place 
here to generate our electricity and have it all simply 
lovely. Couldn’t we, brother? . . . And then 

perhaps they’d let us do some other things.” 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


CH. I 


22J 


“Yes,” said the elder brother, “we could do it very 
nice for them.” 

“Then let’s” said the second brother. 

“I don’t mind,” said the elder brother, and looked 
about for a handy tool. 

And that led to another dreadful bother. 

Agitated multitudes were at them in no time, tell- 
ing them for a thousand reasons to stop, telling them 
to stop for no reason at all — babbling, confused, and 
varied multitudes. The place they were building was 
too high — it couldn’t possibly be safe. It was ugly; 
it interfered with the letting of proper-sized houses in 
the neighbourhood; it ruined the tone of the neigh- 
bourhood; it was unneighbourly ; it was contrary to 
the Local Building Regulations ; it infringed the right 
of the local authority to muddle about with a minute 
expensive electric supply of its own; it interfered with 
the concerns of the local water company. 

Local Government Board clerks roused themselves 
to judicial obstruction. The little lawyer turned up 
again to represent about a dozen threatened interests ; 
local lahdowners appeared in opposition; people with 
mysterious claims claimed to be bought off at exorbi- 
tant rates; the Trades Unions of all the building 
trades lifted up collective voices ; and a ring of deal- 
ers in all sorts of building material became a bar. Ex- 
traordinary associations of people with prophetic 
visions of aesthetic horrors rallied to protect the scen- 
ery of the place where they would build the great 
house, of the valley where they would bank up the 


228 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


water. These last people were absolutely the worst 
asses of the lot, the Cossar boys considered. That 
beautiful house of the Cossar boys was just like a 
walking stick thrust into a wasp’s nest, in no time. 

“I never did!” said the elder boy. 

“We can’t go on,” said the second brother. 

“Rotten little beasts they are,” said the third of the 
brothers; “we can’t do anything!” 

“Even when it’s for their own comfort. Such a 
nice place we’d have made for them too.” 

“They seem to spend their silly little lives getting 
in each other’s way,” said the eldest boy. “Rights 
and laws and regulations and rascalities: it’s like a 
game of spellicans. . . . Well, anyhow, they’ll 

have to live in their grubby, dirty, silly little houses 
for a bit longer. It’s very evident we can’t go on 
with this.” 

And the Cossar children left that great house un- 
finished, a mere hole of foundations and the begin- 
ning of a wall, and sulked back to their big enclosure. 
After a time the hole was filled with water and with 
stagnation, and weeds, and vermin, and the Food, 
either dropped there by the sons of Cossar or blowing 
thither as dust, set growth going in its usual fashion. 
Water voles came out over the country and did in- 
finite havoc, and one day a farmer caught his pigs 
drinking there, and instantly and with great presence 
of mind — for he knew of the great hog of Oakham 
— slew them all. And from that deep pool it was the 
mosquitoes came, quite terrible mosquitoes, whose 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


229 


only virtue was that the sons of Cossar, after being 
bitten for a little, could stand the thing no longer, but 
chose a moonlight night when law and order were 
abed and drained the water clean away into the river 
by Brook. 

But they left the big weeds and the big water voles 
and all sorts of big undesirable things still living and 
breeding on the site they had chosen, the site on 
which the fair great house of the little people might 
have towered to heaven. . . . 


IV 

That had been in the boyhood of the Sons, but now 
they were nearly men. And the chains had been 
tightening upon them and tightening with every year 
of growth. Each year they grew and the Food 
spread and great things multiplied, each year the 
stress and tension rose. The Food had been at first 
for the great mass of mankind a distant marvel, and 
now it was coming home to every threshold and 
threatening, pressing against and distorting the whole 
order of life. It blocked this, it overturned that, it 
changed natural products, and by changing natural 
products it stopped employments and threw men out 
of work by the hundred thousand; it swept over 
boundaries and turned the world of trade into a 
world of cataclysms ; no wonder mankind hated it. 

And since it is easier to hate animate than inani- 
mate things, animals more than plants, and one’s fel- 


2 3 o THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

low men more completely than any animals, the fear 
and trouble engendered by giant nettles and six-foot 
grass blades, awful insects and tiger-like vermin, 
grew all into one great power of detestation that 
aimed itself with a simple directness at that scat- 
tered band of great human beings, the Children of 
the Food. That hatred had become the central force 
in political affairs. The old party lines had been 
traversed and effaced altogether under the insistence 
of these newer issues, and the conflict lay now with 
the party of the temporisers, who were for putting 
little political men to control and regulate the Food, 
and the party of reaction for whom Caterham spoke, 
speaking always with a more sinister ambiguity, crys- 
tallising his intention first in one threatening phrase 
and then another, now that men must “prune the 
bramble growths,” now that they must find a “cure 
for elephantiasis,” and at last upon the eve of the 
election that they must “Grasp the nettle.” 

One day the three sons of Cossar, who were now 
no longer boys but men, sat among the masses of their 
futile work and talked together after their fashion of 
all these things. They had been working all day at 
one of a series of great and complicated trenches their 
father had bid them make, and now it was sunset and 
they sat in the little garden space before the great 
house and looked at the world and rested, until the 
little servants within should say their food was ready. 

You must figure these mighty forms, forty feet 
high the least of them was, reclining on a patch of 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


231 


turf that would have seemed a stubble of reeds to a 
common man. One sat up and chipped earth from 
his huge boots with an iron girder he grasped in his 
hand ; the second rested on his elbow ; the third whit- 
tled a pine tree into shape and made a smell of resin 
in the air. They were clothed not in cloth but in un- 
der-garments of woven rope and outer clothes of 
felted aluminium wire; they were shod with timber 
and iron and the links and buttons and belts of their 
clothing were all of plated steel. The great single- 
storeyed house they lived in, Egyptian in its massive- 
ness, half built of monstrous blocks of chalk and half 
excavated from the living rock of the hill, had a 
front a full hundred feet in height, and beyond, the 
chimneys and wheels, the cranes and covers of their 
work sheds rose marvellously against the sky. 
Through a circular window in the house there was 
visible a spout from which some white hot metal 
dripped and dripped in measured drops into a recep- 
tacle out of sight. The place was enclosed and rudely 
fortified by monstrous banks of earth backed with 
steel both over the crests of the Downs above, and 
across the dip of the valley. It needed something of 
common size to mark the nature of the scale. The 
train that came rattling from Sevenoaks athwart their 
vision, and presently plunged into the tunnel out of 
their sight, looked by contrast with them like some 
small-sized automatic toy. 

“They have made all the woods this side of 
Ightham out of bounds,” said one, “and moved the 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


232 

board that was out by Knockholt two miles and 
more this way.” 

“It is the least they could do,” said the youngest, 
after a pause. “They are trying to take the wind out 
of Caterham’s sails.” 

“It’s not enough for that and — it is almost too 
much for us,” said the third. 

“They are cutting us off from Brother Redwood. 
Last time I went to him the red notices had crept a 
mile in, either way. The road to him along the 
Downs is no more than a narrow lane.” 

The speaker thought. “What has come to our 
Brother Redwood?” 

“Why?” said the eldest brother. 

The speaker hacked a bough from his pine. “He 
was like — as though he wasn’t awake. He didn’t 
seem to listen to what I had to say. And he said 
something of — love.” 

The youngest tapped his girder on the edge of his 
iron sole and laughed. “Brother Redwood,” he said, 
“has dreams.” 

Neither spoke for a space. Then the eldest 
brother said, “This cooping up and cooping up 
grows more than I can bear. At last, I believe, they 
will draw a line round our boots and tell us to live on 
that.” 

The middle brother swept aside a heap of pine 
boughs with one hand and shifted his attitude. 
“What they do now is nothing to what they will do 
when Caterham has power.” 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


CH. I 


2 33 


“If he gets power,” said the youngest brother, 
smiting the ground with his girder. 

“As he will,” said the eldest, staring at his feet. 

The middle brother ceased his lopping and his eye 
went to the great banks that sheltered them about. 
“Then, brothers,” he said, “our youth will be over 
and as Father Redwood said to us long ago, we must 
quit ourselves like men.” 

“Yes,” said the eldest brother; “but what exactly 
does that mean ? Just what does it mean — when that 
day of trouble comes?” 

He too glanced at those rude vast suggestions of 
entrenchment about them, looking not so much at 
them as through them and over the hills to the in- 
numerable multitudes beyond. .* Something of the 
same sort came into all their minds, a vision of little 
people coming out to war, in a flood, the little people 
inexhaustible, incessant, malignant. . . . 

“They are little,” said the youngest brother; “but 
they have numbers beyond counting, like the sands of 
the sea.” 

“They have arms — they have weapons even, that 
our brothers in Sunderland have made.” 

“Besides, Brothers, except for vermin, except for 
little accidents with evil things, what have we seen of 
killing?” 

“I know,” said the eldest brother. “For all that — 
we are what we are. When the day of trouble comes 
we must do the thing we have to do.” 

He closed his knife with a snap — the blade was 


234 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

the length of a man — and used his new pine staff to 
help himself rise. He stood up and turned towards 
the squat grey immensity of the house. The crimson 
of the sunset caught him as he rose, caught the mail 
and clasps about his neck and the woven metal of his 
arms, and to the eyes of his brother it seemed as 
though he was suddenly suffused with blood. . . . 

As the young giant rose a little black figure became 
visible to him against that western incandescence on 
the top of the embankment that towered above the 
summit of the down. The black limbs waved in un- 
gainly gestures. Something in the fling of the limbs 
suggested haste to the young giant’s mind. He 
waved his pine mast in reply, filled the whole valley 
with his vast Hallo ! threw a “Something’s up” to his 
brothers, and set off in twenty-foot strides to meet 
and help his father. 


V 

It chanced too that a young man who was not a 
giant was delivering his soul about these sons of Cos- 
sar just at that same time. He had come over the hills 
beyond Sevenoaks, he and his friend, and he it was 
did the talking. In the hedge as they came along they 
had heard a pitiful squealing and had intervened to 
rescue three nestling tits from the attack of a couple 
of giant ants. That adventure it was had set him 
talking. 

“Reactionary!” he was saying, as they came within 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


^3 S 


sight of the Cossar encampment. “Who wouldn’t be 
reactionary? Look at that square of ground, that 
space of'God’s earth that was once sweet and fair, 
torn, desecrated, disembowelled! Those sheds! 
That great wind-wheel! That monstrous wheeled 
machine ! Those dykes ! Look at those three mon- 
sters squatting there, plotting some ugly devilment or 
other! Look — look at all the land!” 

His friend glanced at his face. “You have been 
listening to Caterham,” he said. 

“Using my eyes. Looking a little into the peace 
and order of the past we leave behind. This foul 
Food is the last shape of the Devil, still set as ever 
upon the ruin of our world. Think what the world 
must have been before our days, what it was still 
when our mothers bore us, and see it now! Think 
how these slopes once smiled under the golden har- 
vest, how the hedges, full of sweet little flowers, 
parted the modest portion of this man from that, how 
the ruddy farmhouses dotted the land and the voice 
of the church bells from yonder tower stilled the 
whole world each Sabbath into Sabbath prayer. And 
now, every year, still more and more of monstrous 
weeds, of monstrous vermin, and these giants grow- 
ing all about us, straddling over us, blundering 
against all that is subtle and sacred in our world. 
Why here — Look!” 

He pointed, and his friend’s eyes followed the line 
of his white finger. 

“One of their footmarks. See ! It has smashed it- 


23 6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

self three feet deep and more, a pitfall for horse and 
rider, a trap to the unwary. There is a briar rose 
smashed to death; there is grass uprooted and a 
teazle crushed aside, a farmer’s drain pipe snapped 
and the edge of the pathway broken down. Destruc- 
tion ! So they are doing all over the world, all over 
the order and decency the world of men has made. 
Trampling on all things. Reaction! What else?” 

“But — reaction. What do you hope to do?” 

“Stop it!” cried the young man from Oxford. 
“Before it is too late.” 

“But ” 

“It’s not impossible,” cried the young man from 
Oxford, with a jump in his voice. “We want the 
firm hand ; we want the subtle plan, the resolute mind. 
We have been mealy-mouthed and weak-handed; we 
have trifled and temporised, and the Food has grown 
and grown. Yet even now ” 

He stopped for a moment. “This is the echo of 
Caterham,” said his friend. 

“Even now. Even now there is hope — abundant 
hope, if only we make sure of what we want and what 
we mean to destroy. The mass of people are with us, 
much more with us than they were a few years ago ; 
the law is with us, the constitution and order of so- 
ciety, the spirit of the established religions, the cus- 
toms and habits of mankind are with us — and against 
the Food. Why should we temporise? Why should 
we lie? We hate it, we don’t want it; why then 
should we have it? Do you mean to just grizzle and 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


CH. I 


2 37 


obstruct passively and do nothing — till the sands are 
out?” 

He stopped short and turned about. “Look at 
that grove of nettles there. In the midst of them are 
homes — deserted — where once clean families of sim- 
ple men played out their honest lives ! 

“And there !” he swung round to where the young 
Cossars muttered to one another of their wrongs. 

“Look at them! And I know their father, a 
brute, a sort of brute beast with an intolerant loud 
voice, a creature who has run amuck in our all too 
merciful world for the last thirty years and more. An 
engineer ! To him all that we hold dear and sacred 
is nothing. Nothing! The splendid traditions of 
our race and land, the noble institutions, the vener- 
able order, the broad slow march from precedent to 
precedent that has made our English people great 
and this sunny island free — it is all an idle tale, told 
and done with. Some claptrap about the Future is 
worth all these sacred things. . . . The sort of 

man who would run a tramway over his mother’s 
grave if he thought that was the cheapest line the 
tramway could take. . . . And you think to 

temporise, to make some scheme of compromise, that 
will enable you to live in your way while that — that 
machinery — lives in its. I tell you it is hopeless — 
hopeless. As well make treaties with a tiger ! They 
want things monstrous — we want them sane and 
sweet. It is one thing or the other.” 

“But what can you do?” 


23 8 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

“Much! All! Stop the Food! They are still 
scattered, these giants, still immature and disunited. 
Chain them, gag them, muzzle them. At any cost 
stop them. It is their world or ours ! Stop the Food. 
Shut up these men who make it. Do anything to stop 
Cossar! You don’t seem to remember — one gener- 
ation — only one generation needs holding down and 
then — Then we could level those mounds there, 
fill up their footsteps, take the ugly sirens from our 
church towers, smash all our elephant guns, and turn 
our faces again to the old order, the ripe old civilisa- 
tion for which the soul of man is fitted.” 

“It’s a mighty effort.” 

“For a mighty end. And if we don’t? Don’t you 
see the prospect before us clear as day? Every- 
where the giants will increase and multiply; every- 
where they will make and scatter the Food. The 
grass will grow gigantic in our fields, the weeds in 
our hedges, the vermin in the thickets, the rats in the 
drains. More and more and more. This is only a 
beginning. The insect world will rise on us, the plant 
world, the very fishes in the sea will swamp and 
drown our ships. Tremendous growths will obscure 
and hide our houses, smother our churches, smash and 
destroy all the order of our cities, and we shall be- 
come no more than a feeble vermin under the heels 
of the new race. Mankind will be swamped and 
drowned in things of its own begetting ! And all for 
nothing! Size! Mere size! Enlargement and da 
capo. Already we go picking our way among the 


CH. I 


THE ALTERED WORLD 


2 39 


first beginnings of the coming time. And all we do 
is to say ‘How inconvenient!’ To grumble and do 
nothing. No!” 

He raised his hand. 

“Let them do the thing they have to do ! So also 
will I. I am for Reaction — unstinted and fearless 
Reaction. Unless you mean to take this Food also, 
what else is there to do in all the world. We have 
trifled in the middle ways too long. You! Trifling 
in the middle ways is your habit, your circle of exist- 
ence, your space and time. So, not I ! I am against 
the Food, with all my strength and purpose against 
the Food.” 

He turned on his companion’s grunt of dissent. 
“Where are you?” 

“It’s a complicated business ” 

“Oh! — Driftwood!” said the young man from 
Oxford, very bitterly, with a fling of all his limbs. 
“The middle way is nothingness. It is one thing or 
the other. Eat or destroy. Eat or destroy ! What 
else is there to do?” 


CHAPTER THE SECOND 


THE GIANT LOVERS 

I 

Now it chanced in the days when Caterham was cam- 
paigning against the Boom-children before the Gen- 
eral Election that was — amidst the most tragic and 
terrible circumstances — to bring him into power, that 
the giant Princess, that Serene Highness whose early 
nutrition had played so great a part in the brilliant 
career of Doctor Winkles, had come from the king- 
dom of her father to England, on an occasion that 
was deemed important. She was affianced for rea- 
sons of state to a certain Prince — and the wedding 
was to be made an event of international significance. 
There had arisen mysterious delays. Rumour and 
Imagination collaborated in the story and many 
things were said. There were suggestions of a recal- 
citrant Prince who declared he would not be made to 
look like a fool — at least to this extent. People sym- 
pathised with him. That is the most significant aspect 
of the affair. 

Now it may seem a strange thing, but it is a fact 
that the giant Princess, when she came to England, 
knew of no other giants whatever. She had lived in 

240 


CH. II 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


241 


a world where tact is almost a passion and reserva- 
tions the air of one’s life. They had kept the thing 
from her; they had hedged her about from sight or 
suspicion of any gigantic form, until her appointed 
coming to England was due. Until she met young 
Redwood she had no inkling that there was such a 
thing as another giant in the world. 

In the kingdom of the father of the Princess there 
were wild wastes of upland and mountains where she 
had been accustomed to roam freely. She loved the 
sunrise and the sunset and all the great drama of the 
open heavens more than anything else in the world, 
but among a people at once so democratic and so ve- 
hemently loyal as the English her freedom was much 
restricted. People came in brakes, in excursion trains, 
in organised multitudes to see her; they would cycle 
long distances to stare at her, and it was necessary to 
rise betimes if she would walk in peace. It was still 
near the dawn that morning when young Redwood 
came upon her. 

The Great Park near the Palace where she lodged 
stretched, for a score of miles and more, west and 
south of the western palace gates. The chestnut trees 
of its avenues reached high above her head. Each 
one as she passed it seemed to proffer a more abundant 
wealth of blossom. For a time she was content with 
sight and scent, but at last she was won over by these 
offers, and set herself so busily to choose and pick that 
she did not perceive young Redwood until he was 
close upon her. 


242 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

She moved among the chestnut trees, with the des- 
tined lover drawing near to her, unanticipated, unsus- 
pected. She thrust her hands in among the branches, 
breaking them and gathering them. She was alone 
in the world. Then 

She looked up, and in that moment she was mated. 

We must needs put our imaginations to his stature 
to see the beauty he saw. That unapproachable 
greatness that prevents our immediate sympathy with 
her did not exist for him. There she stood, a gra- 
cious girl, the first created being that had ever seemed 
a mate for him, light and slender, lightly clad, the 
fresh breeze of the dawn moulding the subtly folding 
robe upon her against the soft strong lines of her 
form, and with a great mass of blossoming chestnut 
branches in her hands. The collar of her robe opened 
to show the whiteness of her neck and a soft shad- 
owed roundness that passed out of sight towards her 
shoulders. The breeze had stolen a strand or so of 
her hair, too, and strained its red-tipped brown across 
her cheek. Her eyes were open blue, and her lips 
rested always in the promise of a smile as she reached 
among the branches. 

She turned upon him with a start, saw him, and 
for a space they regarded one another. For her, the 
sight of him was so amazing, so incredible, as to be, 
for some moments at least, terrible. He came to her 
with the shock of a supernatural apparition ; he broke 
all the established law of her world. He was a youth 
of one and twenty then, slenderly built, with his 


CH. II 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


H 3 


father’s darkness and his father’s gravity. He was 
clad in a sober soft brown leather, close-fitting easy 
garments, and in brown hose, that shaped him 
bravely. His head went uncovered in all weathers. 
They stood regarding one another — she incredulously 
amazed, and he with his heart beating fast. It was a 
moment without a prelude, the cardinal meeting of 
their lives. 

For him there was less surprise. He had been 
seeking her, and yet his heart beat fast. He came 
towards her, slowly, with his eyes upon her face. 

“You are the Princess,” he said. “My father has 
told me. You are the Princess who was given the 
Food of the Gods.” 

“I am the Princess — yes,” she said, with eyes of 
wonder. “But — what are you?” 

“I am the son of the man who made the Food of 
the Gods.” 

“The Food of the Gods!” 

“Yes, the Food of the Gods.” 

“But ” 

Her face expressed infinite perplexity. 

“What? I don’t understand. The Food of the 
Gods?” 

“You have not heard?” 

“The Food of the Gods ! No!” 

She found herself trembling violently. The colour 
left her face. “I did not know,” she said. “Do you 
mean ?” 

He waited for her. 


244 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


“Do you mean there are other — giants?” 

He repeated. “Did you not know?” 

And she answered with the growing amazement 
of realisation “No!” 

The whole world and all the meaning of the world 
was changing for her. A branch of chestnut slipped 
from her hand. “Do you mean to say,” she repeated 
stupidly, “that there are other giants in the world? 
That some food ?” 

He caught her amazement. 

“You know nothing?” he cried. “You have never 
heard of us? You, whom the Food has made akin 
to us!” 

There was terror still in the eyes that stared at 
him. Her hand rose towards her throat and fell 
again. She whispered “No.” 

It seemed to her that she must weep or faint. Then 
in a moment she had rule over herself and she was 
speaking and thinking clearly. “All this has been 
kept from me,” she said. “It is like a dream. I have 
dreamt — I have dreamt such things. But wak- 
ing — No. Tell me! Tell me! What are you? 
What is this Food of the Gods? Tell me slowly — 
and clearly. Why have they kept it from me, that 
I am not alone?” 

II 

“Tell me,” she said, and young Redwood, tremu- 
lous and excited, set himself to tell her — it was poor 
and broken telling for a time — of the Food of the 


CH. II 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


245 


Gods and the giant children who were scattered over 
the world. 

You must figure them both, flushed and startled in 
their bearing, getting at one another’s meaning 
through endless half-heard, half-spoken phrases, re- 
peating, making perplexing breaks and new depart- 
ures — a wonderful talk, in which she awakened from 
the ignorance of all her life. And very slowly it be- 
came clear to her that she was no exception to the or- 
der of mankind, but one of a scattered brotherhood, 
who had all eaten the Food and grown for ever out 
of the little limits of the folk beneath their feet. 
Young Redwood spoke of his father, of Cossar, of 
the Brothers scattered throughout the country, of the 
great dawn of wider meaning that had come at last 
into the history of the world. “We are in the begin- 
ning of a beginning,” he said; “this world of theirs 
is only the prelude to the world the Food will make.” 

“My father believes — and I also believe — that a 
time will come when littleness will have passed alto- 
gether out of the world of man. When giants shall 
go freely about this earth — their earth — doing con- 
tinually greater and more splendid things. But that 
— that is to come. We are not even' the first genera- 
tion of that — we are the first experiments.” 

“And of these things,” she said, “I knew nothing !” 

“There are times when it seems to me almost as if 
we had come too soon. Some one, I suppose, had to 
come first. But the world was all unprepared for our 
coming and for the coming of all the lesser great 


246 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

things that drew their greatness from the Food. 
There have been blunders; there have been conflicts. 
The little people hate our kind. 

“They are hard towards us because they are so 
little. . . . And because our feet are heavy on 

the things that make their lives. But at any rate they 
hate us now; they will have none of us — only if we 
could shrink back to the common size of them would 
they begin to forgive. 

“They are happy in houses that are prison cells to 
us ; their cities are too small for us ; we go in misery 
along their narrow ways ; we cannot worship in their 
churches. . . . 

“We see over their walls and over their protec- 
tions; we look inadvertently into their upper win- 
dows; we look over their customs; their laws are no 
more than a net about our feet. 

“Every time we stumble we hear them shouting; 
every time we blunder against their limits or stretch 
out to any spacious act. . . . 

“Our easy paces are wild flights to them, and all 
they deem great and wonderful no more than doll’s 
pyramids to us. Their pettiness of method and ap- 
pliance and imagination hampers and defeats our 
powers. There are no machines to the power of our 
hands, no helps to fit our needs. They hold our 
greatness in servitude by a thousand invisible bands. 
We are stronger, man for man, a hundred times, 
but we are disarmed; our very greatness makes us 
debtors; they claim the land we stand upon; they 


CH. II 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


247 


tax our ampler need of food and shelter, and for 
all these things we must toil with the tools these 
dwarfs can make us — and to satisfy their dwarfish 
fancies. . . . 

“They pen us in, in every way. Even to live one 
must cross their boundaries. Even to meet you here 
to-day I have passed a limit. All that is reasonable 
and desirable in life they make out of bounds for us. 
We may not go into the towns; we may not cross the 
bridges ; we may not step on their ploughed fields or 
into the harbours of the game they kill. I am cut off 
now from all our Brethren except the three sons of 
Cossar, and even that way the passage narrows day 
by day. One could think they sought occasion against 
us to do some more evil thing. . . .” 

“But we are strong,” she said. 

“We should be strong — yes. We feel, all of us — 
you too I know must feel — that we have power, 
power to do great things, power insurgent in us. But 
before we can do anything ” 

He flung out a hand that seemed to sweep away 
a world. 

“Though I thought I was alone in the world,” she 
said, after a pause, “I have thought of these things. 
They have taught me always that strength was al- 
most a sin, that it was better to be little than great, 
that all true religion was to shelter the weak and 
little, encourage the weak and little, help them to 
multiply and multiply until at last they crawled over 
one another, to sacrifice all our strength in their cause. 


248 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

But . . . always I have doubted the thing they 

taught.’’ 

“This life,” he said, “these bodies of ours, are not 
for dying.” 

“No.” 

“Nor to live in futility. But if we would not do 
that, it is already plain to all our Brethren a conflict 
must come. I know not what bitterness of conflict 
must presently come, before the little folks will suffer 
us to live as we need to live. All the Brethren have 
thought of that. Cossar, of whom I told you ; he too 
has thought of that.” 

“They are very little and weak.” 

“In their way. But you know all the means of 
death are in their hands, and made for their hands. 
For hundreds of thousands of years, these little peo- 
ple, whose world we invade, have been learning how 
to kill one another. They are very able at that. 
They are able in many ways. And besides, they can 
deceive and change suddenly. ... I do not 
know. . . . There comes a conflict. You — 

you perhaps are different from us. For us, assuredly, 
the conflict comes. . . . The thing they call 

War. We know it. In a way we prepare for it. 
But you know — those little people ! — we do not know 
how to kill, at least we do not want to kill ” 

“Look,” she interrupted, and he heard a yelping 
horn. 

He turned at the direction of her eyes, and found 
a bright yellow motor car, with dark goggled driver, 


ch. ii THE GIANT LOVERS a 49 

and fur-clad passengers, whooping, throbbing, and 
buzzing resentfully at his heel. He moved his foot, 
and the mechanism, with three angry snorts, resumed 
its fussy way towards the town. “Filling up the 
roadway!” floated up to him. 

Then some one said, “Look! Did you see? There 
is the monster Princess over beyond the trees!” and 
all their goggled faces came round to stare. 

“I say,” said another. “That won’t do. . . .” 

“All this,” she said, “is more amazing than I can 
tell.” 

“That they should not have told you,” he said, and 
left his sentence incomplete. 

“Until you came upon me, I had lived in a world 
where I was great — alone. I had made myself a life 
— for that. I had thought I was the victim of some 
strange freak of nature. And now my world has 
crumbled down, in half an hour, and I see another 
world, other conditions, wider possibilities — fellow- 
ship ” 

“Fellowship,” he answered. 

“I want you to tell me more yet, and much more,” 
she said. “You know this passes through my mind 
like a tale that is told. You even. ... In a 
day perhaps, or after several days, I shall believe 
in you. Now — Now I am dreaming. . . . 

Listen !” 

The first stroke of a clock above the palace offices 
far away had penetrated to them. Each counted 
mechanically “Seven.” 


250 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

“This,” she said, “should be the hour of my re- 
turn. They will be taking the bowl of my coffee into 
the hall where I sleep. The little officials and ser- 
vants — you cannot dream how grave they are — will 
be stirring about their little duties. 

“They will wonder. . . . But I want to talk 

to you.” 

She thought. “But I want to think too. I want 
now to think alone, and think out this change in 
things, think away the old solitude, and think you 
and those others into my world. ... I shall 
go. I shall go back to-day to my place in the castle, 
and to-morrow, as the dawn comes, I shall come 
again — here.” 

“I shall be here waiting for you.” 

“All day I shall dream and dream of this new 
world you have given me. Even now, I can scarcely 
believe ” 

She took a step back and surveyed him from the 
feet to the face. Their eyes met and locked for a 
moment. 

“Yes,” she said, with a little laugh that was half 
a sob. “You are real. But it is very wonderful ! Do 
you think — indeed — ? Suppose to-morrow I come 
and find you — a pigmy like the others! . . . 

Yes, I must think. And so for to-day — as the little 
people do ” 

She held out her hand, and for the first time they 
touched one another. Their hands clasped firmly 
and their eyes met again. 


CH. II 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


251 


“Good-bye,” she said, “for to-day. Good-bye! 
Good-bye, Brother Giant !” 

He hesitated with some unspoken thing, and at 
last he answered her simply, “Good-bye.” 

For a space they held each other’s hands, study- 
ing each the other’s face. And many times after they 
had parted, she looked back half doubtfully at him, 
standing still in the place where they had met. . . . 

She walked into her apartments across the great 
yard of the Palace like one who walks in a dream, 
with a vast branch of chestnut trailing from her hand. 


Ill 

These two met altogether fourteen times before the 
beginning of the end. They met in the Great Park, 
or on the heights and among the gorges of the rusty- 
roaded, heathery moorland, set with dusky pine 
woods, that stretched to the southwest. Twice they 
met in the great avenue of chestnuts, and five times 
near the broad ornamental water the king, her great- 
grandfather, had made. There was a place where 
a great trim lawn, set with tall conifers, sloped gra- 
ciously to the water’s edge, and there she would sit, 
and he would lie at her knees and look up in her face 
and talk, telling of all the things that had been, and 
of the work his father had set before him, and of the 
great and spacious dream of what the giant people 
should one day be. Commonly they met in the early 
dawn, but once they met there in the afternoon, and 


252 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

found presently a multitude of peering eavesdrop- 
pers about them, cyclists, pedestrians, peeping from 
the bushes, rustling (as sparrows will rustle about one 
in the London parks) amidst the dead leaves in the 
woods behind, gliding down the lake in boats tow- 
ards a point of view, trying to get nearer to them and 
hear. 

It was the first hint that offered of the enormous 
interest the countryside was taking in their meetings. 
And once — it was the seventh time, and it precipi- 
tated the scandal — they met out upon the breezy 
moorland under a clear moonlight, and talked in 
whispers there, for the night was warm and still. 

Very soon they had passed from the realisation 
that in them and through them a new world of 
giantry shaped itself in the earth, from the contem- 
plation of the great struggle between big and little, 
in which they were clearly destined to participate, to 
interests at once more personal and more spacious. 
Each time they met and talked and looked on one 
another, it crept a little more out of their subcon- 
scious being towards recognition, that something 
more dear and wonderful than friendship was be- 
tween them, and walked between them and drew their 
hands together. And in a little while they came to 
the word itself and found themselves lovers, the 
Adam and Eve of a new race in the world. 

They set foot side by side into the wonderful valley 
of love, with its deep and quiet places. The world 
changed about them with their changing mood, until 


CH. II 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


253 


presently it had become, as it were, a tabernacular 
beauty about their meetings, and the stars were no 
more than flowers of light beneath the feet of their 
love, and the dawn and sunset the coloured hangings 
by the way. They ceased to be beings of flesh and 
blood to one another and themselves; they passed 
into a bodily texture of tenderness and desire. They 
gave it first whispers and then silence, and drove 
close and looked into one another’s moonlit and 
shadowy faces under the infinite arch of the sky. 
And the still black pine trees stood about them like 
sentinels. 

The beating steps of time were hushed into silence, 
and it seemed to them the universe hung still. Only 
their hearts were audible, beating. They seemed to 
be living together in a world where there is no death, 
and indeed so it was with them then. It seemed to 
them that they sounded, and indeed they Sounded, 
such hidden splendours in the very heart of things as 
none have ever reached before. Even for mean and 
little souls, love is the revelation of splendours. And 
these were giant lovers who had eaten the Food of 
the Gods. ... 


You may imagine the spreading consternation in 
this ordered world when it became known that the 
Princess who was affianced to the Prince, the Prin- 
cess, Her Serene Highness! with royal blood in her 
veins! met — frequently met — the hypertrophied off- 
spring of a common professor of chemistry, a creature 


254 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 

of no rank, no position, no wealth, and talked to 
him as though there were no Kings and Princes, no 
order, no reverence — nothing but Giants and Pig- 
mies in the world, talked to him and, it was only too 
certain, held him as her lover. 

“If those newspaper fellows get hold of it!” 
gasped Sir Arthur Poodle Bootlick. . . . 

“I am told — ” whispered the old Bishop of 
Frumps. . . . 

“New story upstairs,” said the first footman, as he 
nibbled among the dessert things. “So far as I can 
make out this here giant Princess ” 

“They say — ” said the lady who kept the sta- 
tioner’s shop by the main entrance to the Palace, 
where the little Americans get their tickets for the 
State Apartments. 

And then: 

“We are authorised to deny — ” said “Picaroon” 
in Gossip. 

And so the whole trouble came out. 

IV 

“They say that we must part,” the Princess said 
to her lover. 

“But why?” he cried. “What new folly have 
these people got into their heads?” 

“Do you know,” she asked, “that to love me — is 
high treason?” 

“My dear,” he cried; “but does it matter? What 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


CH. II 


*55 


is their right — right without a shadow of reason — 
and their treason and their loyalty to us?” 

“You shall hear,” she said, and told him of the 
things that had been told to her. 

“It was the queerest little man who came to me — 
with a soft beautifully modulated voice, a softly mov- 
ing little gentleman who sidled into the room like a 
cat and put his pretty white hand up so, whenever he 
had anything significant to say. He is bald, but not 
of course nakedly bald, and his nose and face are 
chubby rosy little things and his beard is trimmed to 
a point in quite the loveliest way. He pretended to 
have emotions several times and made his eyes shine. 
You know he is quite a friend of the real royal fam- 
ily here, and he called me his dear young lady and 
was perfectly sympathetic even from the begin- 
ning. ‘My dear young lady,’ he said, ‘you know 
— you mustn’t ,’ several times, and then, ‘you owe 
a duty.’ ” 

“Where do they make such men?” 

“He likes it,” she said. 

“But I don’t see ” 

“He told me serious things.” 

“You don’t think,” he said, turning on her 
abruptly, “that there’s anything in the sort of thing he 
said?” 

“There’s something in it quite certainly,” said she. 

“You mean ?” 

“I mean that without knowing it we have been 
trampling on the most sacred conceptions of the little 


256 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. in 

folks. We who are royal are a class apart. We are 
worshipped prisoners, processional toys. We pay for 
worship by losing — our elementary freedom. And 
I was to have married that Prince — You know 
nothing of him though. Well, a pigmy Prince. He 
doesn’t matter. ... It seems it would have 
strengthened the bonds between my country and an- 
other. And this country also — was to profit. Imag- 
ine it! — strengthening the bonds!” 

“And now?” 

“They want me to go on with it — as though there 
was nothing between us two.” 

“Nothing!” 

“Yes. But that isn’t all. He said ” 

“Your specialist in Tact?” 

“Yes. He said, it would be better for you, better 
for all the giants, if we two — abstained from conver- 
sation. That was how he put it.” 

“But what can they do if we don’t?” 

“He said you might have your freedom.” 

“//” 

“He said, with a stress, ‘My dear young lady, it 
would be better, it would be more dignified, if you 
parted, willingly.’ That was all he said. With a 
stress on willingly.” 

“But — ! What business is it of these little 
wretches, where we love, how we love ! What have 
they and their world to do with us?” 

“They do not think that.” 

“Of course,” he said, “you disregard all this,” 


CH. II 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


257 


“It seems utterly foolish to me.” 

“That their laws should fetter us ! That we, at the 
first spring of life, should be tripped by their old 
engagements, their aimless institutions! Oh — ! 
We disregard it.” 

“I am yours. So far — yes.” 

“So far? Isn’t that all?” 

“But they — If they want to part us ” 

“What can they do?” 

“I don’t know. What can they do?” 

“Who cares what they can do, or what they will 
do? I am yours and you are mine. What is there 
more than that? I am yours and you are mine — for 
ever. Do you think I will stop for their little rules, 
for their little prohibitions, their scarlet boards in- 
deed! — and keep from you?” 

“Yes. But still, what can they do?” 

“You mean,” he said, “what are we to do?” 

“Yes.” 

“We? We can go on.” 

“But if they seek to prevent us?” 

He clenched his hands. He looked round as if the 
little people were already coming to prevent them. 
Then turned away from her and looked about the 
world. “Yes,” he said. “Your question was the 
right one. What can they do?” 

“Here in this little land,” she said and stopped. 

He seemed to survey it all. “They are every- 
where.” 

“But we might ” 


258 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. in 
“Whither?” 

“We could go. We could swim the seas together. 
Beyond the seas ” 

“I have never been beyond the seas.” 

“There are great and desolate mountains amidst 
which we should seem no more than little people, 
there are remote and deserted valleys, there are hid- 
den lakes and snow girdled uplands untrodden by the 
feet of men. There ” 

“But to get there we must fight our way day after 
day through millions and millions of mankind.” 

“It is our only hope. In this crowded land there 
is no fastness, no shelter. What place is there for us 
among these multitudes? They who are little can 
hide from one another, but where are we to hide? 
There is no place where we could eat, no place where 
we could sleep. If we fled — night and day they 
would pursue our footsteps.” 

A thought came to him. 

“There is one place,” he said, “even in this island.” 

“Where?” 

“The place our brothers have made over beyond 
there. They have made great banks about their 
house, north and south and east and west ; they have 
made deep pits and hidden places and even now — one 
came over to me quite recently. He said — I did not 
altogether heed what he said then. But he spoke of 
arms. It may be — there — we should find shel- 
ter. . . .” 

“For many days,” he said, after a pause, “I have 


CH. II 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


259 


not seen our Brothers. . . . Dear ! I have 

been dreaming, I have been forgetting! The days 
have passed and I have done nothing but look to see 
you again. ... I must go to them and talk to 
them and tell them of you and of all the things that 
hang over us. If they will help us, they can help us. 
Then indeed we might hope. I do not know how 
strong their place is, but certainly Cossar will have 
made it strong. Before all this — before you came to 
me, I remember now — there was trouble brewing. 
There was an election — when all the little people set- 
tle things by counting heads. It must be over now. 
There were threats against all our race, against all 
our race, that is, but you. I must see our Brothers. 
I must tell them all that has happened between us 
and all that threatens now. 

V 

He did not come to their next meeting until she 
had waited some time. They were to meet that day 
about midday in a great space of park that fitted into 
a bend of the river, and as she waited, looking ever 
southward under her hand it came to her that the 
world was very still, that indeed it was broodingly 
still. And then she perceived that, spite of the late- 
ness of the hour, her customary retinue of voluntary 
spies had failed her. Left and right, when she came 
to look, there was no one in sight, and there was 
never a boat upon the silver curve of the Thames. 


260 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 


She tried to find a reason for this strange stillness in 
the world. . . . 

Then, a grateful sight for her, she saw young Red- 
wood far away over a gap in the tree masses that 
bounded her view. 

Immediately the trees hid him and presently he 
was thrusting through them and in sight again. She 
could see there was something different, and then 
she saw that he was hurrying unusually and then 
that he limped. He gestured to her and she 
walked towards him. His face became clearer, and 
she saw with infinite concern that he winced at every 
stride. 

She was running now towards him, her mind full 
of questions and vague fear. He drew near to her 
and spoke without a greeting. 

“Are we to part?” he panted. 

“No,” she answered. “Why? What is the mat- 
ter?” 

“But if we do not part — ! It is now! 1 

“What is the matter?” 

“I do not want to part,” he said. “Only ” 

He broke off abruptly to ask, “You will not part 
from me?” 

She met his eyes with a steadfast look. “What 
has happened?” she pressed. 

“Not for a time?” 

“What time?” 

“Years perhaps.” 

“Part! No!” 


CII. II 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


261 


“You have thought?” he insisted. 

“I will not part.” She took his hand. “If this 
meant death, now, I would not let you go.” 

“If it meant death,” he said, and she felt his grip 
upon her fingers. 

He looked about him as if he feared to see the little 
people coming as he spoke. And then : “It may mean 
death.” 

“Now tell me,” she said. 

“They tried to stop my coming.” 

“How?” 

“And as I came out of my workshop where I 
make the Food of the Gods for the Cossars to store 
in their camp, I found a little officer of police — a man 
in blue with white clean gloves — who beckoned me 
to stop. ‘This way is closed!’ said he. I thought 
little of that; I went round my workshop to where 
another road runs west, and there was another officer. 
‘This road is closed!’ he said, and added: ‘all the 
roads are closed!’ ” 

“And then?” 

“I argued with him a little. ‘They are public 
roads !’ ” I said. 

“ ‘That’s it,’ said he. ‘You spoil them for the pub- 
lic.’ 

“ ‘Very well,’ said I, ‘I’ll take the fields,’ and then 
up leapt others from behind a hedge and said, ‘These 
fields are private.” 

“ ‘Curse your public and private,’ I said, ‘I’m go- 
ing to my Princess,’ and I stooped down and picked 


262 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 


him up very gently — kicking and shouting — and put 
him out of my way. In a minute all the fields about 
me seemed alive with running men. I saw one on 
horseback galloping beside me and reading some- 
thing as he rode — shouting it. He finished and 
turned and galloped away from me — head down. I 
couldn’t make it out. And then behind me I heard 
the crack of guns.” 

“Guns!” 

“Guns — just as they shoot at the rats. The bul- 
lets came through the air with a sound like things 
tearing: one stung me in the leg.” 

“And you?” 

“Came on to you here and left them shouting and 

running and shooting behind me. And now ” 

“Now?” 

“It is only the beginning. They mean that we shall 
part. Even now they are coming after me.” 

“We will not.” 

“No. But if we will not part — then you must 
come with me to our Brothers.” 

“Which way?” she said. 

“To the east. Yonder is the way my pursuers will 
be coming. This then is the way we must go. Along 
this avenue of trees. Let me go first, so that if they 
are waiting ” 

He made a stride, but she had seized his arm. 

“No,” cried she. “I come close to you, holding 
you. Perhaps I am royal, perhaps I am sacred. If 
I hold you — Would God we could fly with my 


THE GIANT LOVERS 


CH. II 


263 


arms about you ! — it may be, they will not shoot at 
you ” 

She clasped his shoulder and seized his hand as she 
spoke; she pressed herself nearer to him. “It may be 
they will not shoot you,” she repeated, and with a sud- 
den passion of tenderness he took her into his arms 
and kissed her cheek. For a space he held her. 

“Even if it is death,” she whispered. 

She put her arms about his neck and lifted her face 
to his. 

“Dearest, kiss me once more.” 

He drew her to him. Silently they kissed one an- 
other on the lips, and for another moment clung to 
one another. Then hand in hand, and she striving 
always to keep her body near to his, they set forward 
if haply they might reach the camp of refuge the 
sons of Cossar had made, before the pursuit of the 
little people overtook them. 

And as they crossed the great spaces of the park 
behind the castle there came horsemen galloping out 
from among the trees and vainly seeking to keep pace 
with their giant strides. And presently ahead of 
them were houses and men with guns running out of 
the houses. At the sight of that, though he sought 
to go on and was even disposed to fight and push 
through, she made him turn aside towards the south. 

As they fled a bullet whipped by them overhead. 


CHAPTER THE THIRD 


YOUNG CADDLES IN LONDON 

I 

All unaware of the trend of events, unaware of the 
laws that were closing in upon all the Brethren, un- 
aware indeed that there lived a Brother for him on 
the earth, young Caddies chose this time to come out 
of his chalk pit and see the world. His brooding 
came at last to that. There was no answer to all his 
questions in Cheasing Eyebright; the new Vicar was 
less luminous even than the old, and the riddle of his 
pointless labour grew at last to the dimensions of ex- 
asperation. “Why should I work in this pit day after 
day?” he asked. “Why should I walk within bounds 
and be refused all the wonders of the world beyond 
there ? What have I done, to be condemned to this ?” 

And one day he stood up, straightened his back, 
and said in a loud voice, “No ! 

“I won’t,” he said, and then with great vigour 
cursed the pit. 

Then having few words he sought to express his 
thought in acts. He took a truck half filled with 
chalk, lifted it and flung it, smash, against another. 

264 


ch. hi CADDLES IN LONDON 


265 

Then he grasped a whole row of empty trucks and 
spun them down a bank. He sent a huge boulder of 
chalk bursting among them, and then ripped up a 
dozen yards of rail with a mighty plunge of his foot. 
So he commenced the conscientious wrecking of the 
pit. 

“Work all my days,” he said, “at this!” 

It was an astonishing five minutes for the little 
geologist he had, in his preoccupation, overlooked. 
This poor little creature having dodged two boulders 
by a hairbreadth, got out by the westward corner and 
fled athwart the hill, with flapping rucksack and 
twinkling knickerbockered legs, leaving a trail of 
Cretaceous echinoderms behind him, while young 
Caddies, satisfied with the destruction he had 
achieved, came striding out to fulfil his purpose in 
the world. 

“Work in that old pit, until I die and rot and 
stink ! . . . What worm did they think was liv- 

ing in my giant body? Dig chalk for God knows 
what foolish purpose ! Not I! ” 

The trend of road and railway perhaps, or mere 
chance it was, turned his face to London, and thither 
he came striding, over the Downs and athwart the 
meadows, through the hot afternoon, to the infinite 
amazement of the world. It signified nothing to him 
that torn posters in red and white bearing various 
names flapped from every wall and barn; he knew 
nothing of the electoral revolution that had flung 
Caterham, “Jack the Giant-killer,” into power. It 


266 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


signified nothing to him that every police station 
along his route had what was known as Caterham’s 
ukase upon its notice board that afternoon, proclaim- 
ing that no giant, no person whatever over eight feet 
in height, should go more than five miles from his 
“place of location” without a special permission. It 
signified nothing to him that on his wake belated po- 
lice officers, not a little relieved to find themselves be- 
lated, shook warning handbills at his retreating back. 
He was going to see what the world had to show him, 
poor incredulous blockhead, and he did not mean that 
occasional spirited persons shouting “Hi!” at him 
should stay his course. He came on down by Roches- 
ter and Greenwich towards an ever-thickening aggre- 
gation of houses, walking rather slowly now, staring 
about him and swinging his huge chopper. 

People in London had heard something of him be- 
fore, how that he was idiotic but gentle, and wonder- 
fully managed by Lady Wondershoot’s agent and the 
Vicar; how in his dull way he revered these authori- 
ties and was grateful to them for their care of him, 
and so forth. So that when they learnt from the 
newspaper placards that afternoon that he also was 
“on strike,” the thing appeared to many of them as a 
deliberate concerted act. 

“They mean to try our strength,” said the men in 
the trains going home from business. 

“Lucky we have Caterham.” 

“It’s in answer to his proclamation.” 

The men in the clubs were better informed. They 


ch. hi CADDLES IN LONDON 267 

clustered round the tape or talked in groups in their 
smoking-rooms. 

“He has no weapons. He would have gone to 
Sevenoaks if he had been put up to it.” 

“Caterham will handle him. . . 

The shopmen told their customers. The waiters 
in restaurants snatched a moment for an evening 
paper between the courses. The cabmen read it im- 
mediately after the betting news. . . . 

The placards of the chief government evening 
paper were conspicuous with “Grasping the Nettle.” 
Others relied for effect on: “Giant Redwood contin- 
ues to meet the Princess.” The Echo struck a line of 
its own with: “Rumoured Revolt of Giants in the 
North of England. The Sunderland Giants Start for 
Scotland.” The W estminster Gazette sounded its 
usual warning note. “Giants Beware,” said the 
W estminster Gazette, and tried to make a point out 
of it that might perhaps serve towards uniting the 
Liberal party — at that time greatly torn between 
seven intensely egotistical leaders. The later news- 
papers dropped into uniformity. “The Giant in the 
New Kent Road,” they proclaimed. 

“What I want to know,” said the pale young man 
in the tea shop, “is why we aren’t getting any news 
of the young Cossars. You’d think they’d be in it 
most of all. . . 

“They tell me there’s another of them young 
giants got loose,” said the barmaid, wiping out a 
glass. “I’ve always said they was dangerous things 


268 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 


to ’ave about. Right away from the beginning. . . . 
It ought to be put a stop to. Any’ow, I ’ope ’e won’t 
come along ’ere.” 

“I’d like to ’ave a look at ’im,” said the young man 
at the bar recklessly, and added, “I seen the Prin- 
cess.” 

“D’you think they’ll ’urt ’im?” said the barmaid. 

“May ’ave to,” said the young man at the bar, fin- 
ishing his glass. 

Amidst a hum of ten million such sayings young 
Caddies came to London. . . . 

II 

I think of young Caddies always as he was seen in 
the New Kent Road, the sunset warm upon his per- 
plexed and staring face. The Road was thick with 
its varied traffic, omnibuses, trams, vans, carts, trol- 
leys, cyclists, motors, and a marvelling crowd — loaf- 
ers, women, nursemaids, shopping women, children, 
venturesome hobbledehoys — gathered behind his gin- 
gerly moving feet. The hoardings were untidy 
everywhere with the tattered election paper. A bab- 
blement of voices surged about him. One sees the 
customers and shopment crowding in the doorways 
of the shops, the faces that came and went at the win- 
dows, the little street boys running and shouting, the 
policemen taking it all quite stiffly and calmly, the 
workmen knocking off upon scaffoldings, the seething 
miscellany of the little folks. They shouted to him, 


ch. hi CADDLES IN LONDON 269 

vague encouragement, vague insults, the imbecile 
catch words of the day, and he stared down at them, 
at such a multitude of living creatures as he had never 
before imagined in the world. 

Now that he had fairly entered London he had 
had to slacken his pace more and more, the little folks 
crowded so mightily upon him. The crowd grew 
denser at every step, and at last, at a corner where 
two great ways converged, he came to a stop and the 
multitude flowed about him and closed him in. 

There he stood, with his feet a little apart, his back 
to a big corner gin palace that towered twice his 
height and ended in a sky sign, staring down at the 
pigmies and wondering, trying, I doubt not, to col- 
late it all with the other things of his life, with the 
valley among the downlands, the nocturnal lovers, 
the singing in the church, the chalk he hammered 
daily, and with instinct and death and the sky, trying 
to get it all together coherent and significant. His 
brows were knit. He put up his huge paw to scratch 
his coarse hair, and groaned aloud. 

“I don’t see it,” he said. 

His accent was unfamiliar. A great babblement 
went across the open space, a babblement amidst 
which the gongs of the trams, ploughing their obstin- 
ate way through the mass, rose like red poppies 
amidst corn. “What did he say?” “Said he didn’t 
see.” “Said, where is the sea?” “Said, where is a 
seat?” “He wants a seat.” “Can’t the brasted fool 
sit on a ’ouse or somethin’ ?” 


270 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

“What are ye for, ye swarming little people? 
What are ye all doing, what are ye all for? 

“What are ye doing up here, ye swarming little 
people, while I’m a-cuttin’ chalk for ye, down in the 
chalk pits there ?” 

His queer voice, the voice that had been so bad for 
school discipline at Cheasing Eyebright, smote the 
multitude to silence while it sounded and splashed 
them all to tumult at the end. Some wit was audible 
screaming “Speech, speech!” “What’s he saying?” 
was the burthen of the public mind, and an opinion 
was abroad that he was drunk. “Hi, hi, hi,” bawled 
the omnibus drivers, threading a dangerous way. A 
drunken American sailor wandered about tearfully 
inquiring, “What’s he want anyhow?” A leathery- 
faced rag-dealer upon a little pony-drawn cart soared 
up over the tumult by virtue of his voice. “Garn 
’ome, you Brasted Giant!” he brawled, “Garn ’Ome! 
You Brasted Great Dangerous Thing! Can’t 
you see you’re a-frightening the ’orses? Go ’ome 
with you? ’Asn’t any one ’ad the sense to tell 
you the law?” And over all this uproad young 
Caddies stared, perplexed, expectant, saying no 
more. 

Down a side road came a little string of solemn 
policemen, and threaded itself ingeniously into the 
traffic. “Stand back,” said the little voices; “keep 
moving, please.” 

Young Caddies became aware of a little dark blue 
figure thumping at his shin. 


ch. hi CADDLES IN LONDON 


271 

He looked down. “ What ?” he said, bending for- 
ward. 

“Can’t stand about here,” shouted the inspector. 

“No! You can’t stand about here,” he repeated. 

“But where am I to go?” 

“Back to your village. Place of location. Any- 
how, now — you’ve got to move on. You’re obstruct- 
ing the traffic.” 

“What traffic?” 

“Along the road.” 

“But where is it going? Where does it come from? 
What does it mean? They’re all around me. What 
do they want? What are they doin’ ? I want to un- 
derstand. I’m tired of cuttin’ chalk and bein’ all 
alone. What are they doin’ for me while I’m a-cut- 
tin’ chalk? I may just as well understand here and 
now, as anywhere.” 

“Sorry. But we aren’t here to explain things of 
that sort. I must arst you to move on.” 

“Don’t you know?” 

“I must arst you to move on — if you please. . . . 
I’d strongly advise you to get off ’ome. We’ve ’ad 
no special instructions yet — but it’s against the law. 
. . . Clear away there. Clear a-way.” 

The pavement to his left became invitingly bare, 
and young Caddies went slowly on his way. But now 
his tongue was loosened. 

“I don’t understand,” he muttered. “I don’t un- 
derstand.” He would appeal brokenly to the chang- 
ing crowd that ever trailed beside him and behind. 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


272 

“I didn’t know there were such places as this. What 
are all you people doing with yourselves. What’s it 
all for? What is it all for and where do I come in?” 

He had already begotten a new catch word. Young 
men of wit and spirit addressed each other in this 
manner, “Ullo Arry O’Cock. Wot’s it all for? Eh? 
Wot’s it all bloomin’ well for?” 

To which there sprang up a competing variety of 
repartees, for the most part impolite. The most pop- 
ular and best adapted for general use appears to have 
been “Shut it,” or, in a voice of scornful detach- 
ment — 

“Garni” 

III 

What was he seeking? He wanted something the 
pigmy world did not give, some end which the pigmy 
world prevented his attaining, prevented even his 
seeing clearly, which he was never to see clearly. It 
was the gigantic social side of this lonely dumb mon- 
ster crying out for his race, for the things akin to him, 
for something he might love and something he might 
serve, for a purpose he might comprehend and a com- 
mand he could obey. And, you know, all this was 
dumb, raged dumbly within him, could not even had 
he met a fellow giant, have found outlet and expres- 
sion in speech. All the life he knew was the dull round 
of the village, all the speech he knew was the talk of 
the cottage, that failed and collapsed at the bare out- 
line of his least gigantic need. He knew nothing of 


ch. hi CADDLES IN LONDON 


^73 


money, this monstrous simpleton, nothing of trade, 
nothing of the complex pretences upon which the so- 
cial fabric of the little folks was built. He needed, 
he needed — Whatever he needed, he never found 
his need. 

All through the day and the summer night he 
wandered, growing hungry but as yet untired, mark- 
ing the varied traffic of the different streets, the inex- 
plicable businesses of all these infinitesimal beings. In 
the aggregate it had no other colour than confusion 
for him. . . . 

He is said to have plucked a lady from her car- 
riage in Kensington, a lady in evening dress of the 
smartest sort, to have scrutinised her closely, train 
and shoulder blades, and to have replaced her — a 
little carelessly — with the profoundest sigh. For 
that I cannot vouch. For an hour or so he watched 
people fighting for places in the omnibuses at the end 
of Piccadilly. He was seen looming over Kenning- 
ton Oval for some moments in the afternoon, but 
when he saw these dense thousands were engaged 
with the mystery of cricket and quite regardless of him 
he went his way with a groan. 

He came back to Piccadilly Circus between eleven 
and twelve at night and found a new sort of multi- 
tude. Clearly they were very intent: full of things 
they, for inconceivable reasons, might do, and of 
others they might not do. They stared at him and 
jeered at him and went their way. The cabmen, vul- 
ture-eyed, followed one another continually along the 


274 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. in 

edge of the swarming pavement. People emerged 
from the restaurants or entered them, grave, intent, 
dignified, or gently and agreeably excited or keen 
and vigilant — beyond the cheating of the sharpest 
waiter born. The great giant, standing at his corner, 
peered at them all. “What is it all for?” he mur- 
mured in a mournful vast undertone, “What is it all 
for? They are all so earnest. What is it I do not 
understand?” 

And none of them seemed to see, as he could do, 
the drink-sodden wretchedness of the painted women 
at the corner, the ragged misery that sneaked along 
the gutters, the infinite futility of all this employment. 
The infinite futility! None of them seemed to feel 
the shadow of that giant’s need, that shadow of the 
future, that lay athwart their paths. 

Across the road high up mysterious letters flamed 
and went, that might, could he have read them, have 
measured for him the dimensions of human interest, 
have told him of the fundamental needs and features 
of life as the little folks conceived it. First would 
come a flaming 

T; 

Then U would follow, 

T U; 

Then P, 

TUP; 

Until at last there stood complete, across the sky, 
this cheerful message to all who felt the burthen of 
life’s earnestness: 


ch. hi CADDLES IN LONDON 


275 

TUPPER’S TONIC WINE FOR VIGOUR. 

Snap! and it had vanished into night, to be fol- 
lowed in the same slow development by a second uni- 
versal solicitude : 

BEAUTY SOAP. 

Not, you remark, mere cleansing chemicals, but 
something, as they say, “ideal;” and then, completing 
the tripod of the little life: 

YANKER’S YELLOW PILLS. 

After that there was nothing for it but Tupper 
again, in flaming crimson letters, snap, snap, across 
the void. 

T U P P . . . . 

Early in the small hours it would seem that young 
Caddies came to the shadowy quiet of Regent’s Park, 
stepped over the railings and lay down on a grassy 
slope near where the people skate in winter time, 
and there he slept an hour or so. And about six 
o’clock in the morning he was talking to a draggled 
woman he had found sleeping in a ditch near Hamp- 
stead Heath, asking her very earnestly what she 
thought she was for. . . . 


IV 

The wandering of Caddies about London came to 
a head on the second day in the morning. For then 
his hunger overcame him. He hesitated where the 
hot-smelling loaves were being tossed into a cart, and 
then very quietly knelt down and commenced robbery. 


276 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

He emptied the cart while the baker’s man fled for 
the police, and then his great hand came into the 
shop and cleared counter and cases. Then with an 
armful, still eating, he went his way looking for an- 
other shop to go on with is meal. It happened to be 
one of those seasons when work is scarce and food 
dear, and the crowd in that quarter was sympathetic 
even with a giant who took the food they all desired. 
They applauded the second phase of his meal, and 
laughed at his stupid grimace at the policeman. 

“I woff hungry,” he said, with his mouth full. 

“Brayvo!” cried the crowd. “Brayvo!” 

Then when he was beginning his third baker’s 
shop, he was stopped by half a dozen policemen ham- 
mering with truncheons at his shins. “Look here, my 
fine giant, you come along o’ me,” said the officer in 
charge. “You ain’t allowed away from home like 
this. You come off home with me.” 

They did their best to arrest him. There was a 
trolley, I am told, chasing up and down the streets 
at that time, bearing rolls of chain and ships’ cable 
to play the part of handcuffs in that great arrest. 
There was no intention then of killing him. “He is 
no party to the plot,” Caterham had said. “I will 
not have innocent blood upon my hands.” 

At first Caddies did not understand the import of 
these attentions. When he did, he told the police- 
men not to be fools and set off in great strides that 
left them all behind. The bakers’ shops had been in 
the Harrow Road, and he went through canal Lon- 


CH. Ill 


CADDLES IN LONDON 


277 


don to St. John’s Wood and sat down in a private 
garden there to pick his teeth and be speedily assailed 
by another posse of constables. 

“You lea’ me alone,” he growled, and slouched 
through the gardens — spoiling several lawns and 
kicking down a fence or so, while the energetic little 
policemen followed him up, some through the gar- 
dens, some along the road in front of the houses. 
Here there were one or two with guns, but they made 
no use of them. When he came out into the Edg- 
ware Road there was a new note and a new movement 
in the crowd, and a mounted policeman rode over his 
foot and got upset for his pains. 

“You lea’ me alone,” said Caddies, facing the 
breathless crowd. “I ain’t done anything to you.” 

At that time he was unarmed, for he had left his 
chalk chopper in Regent’s Park. But now, poor 
wretch, he seems to have felt the need of some 
weapon. He turned back towards the goods yard of 
the Great Western Railway, wrenched up the stand- 
ard of a tall arc light, a formidable mace for him, 
and flung it over his shoulder. And finding the police 
still turning up to pester him, he went back along the 
Edgware Road, towards Cricklewood, and struck off 
sullenly to the north. 

He wandered as far as Waltham, and then turned 
back westward and then again towards London, and 
came by the cemeteries and over the crest of High- 
gate about midday into view of the greatness of the 
city again. He turned aside and sat down in a gar- 


278 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

den with his back to a house, that overlooked all Lon- 
don. He was breathless, and his face was lowering, 
and now the people no longer crowded upon him as 
they had done when first he came to London, but 
lurked in the adjacent garden, and peeped from cau- 
tious securities. They knew by now the thing was 
grimmer than they had thought. “Why can’t they 
lea’ me alone,” growled young Caddies. “I mus’ eat. 
Why can’t they lea’ me alone.” 

He sat with a darkling face, gnawing at his 
knuckles and looking down over London. All the 
fatigue, worry, perplexity, and impotent wrath of his 
wanderings was coming to a head in him. “They 
mean nothing,” he whispered. “They mean nothing. 
And they won’t let me alone, and they will get in my 
way.” And again, over and over to himself, “mean- 
in’ nothing. 

“Ugh ! the little people !” 

He bit harder at his knuckles and his scowl deep- 
ened. “Cutting’ chalk for ’em,” he whispered. 
“And all the world is theirs! / don’t come in — no- 
where.” 

Presently with a spasm of sick anger he saw the 
now familiar form of a policeman astride the garden 
wall. 

“Leave me alone,” grunted the giant. “Leave 
me alone.” 

“I got to do my duty,” said the little policeman, 
with a face that was white and resolute. 

“You leave me alone. I got to live as well as 


cii. iii CADDLES IN LONDON 


279 

you. I got to think. I got to eat. You lea’ me 
alone.” 

“It’s the Law,” said the little policeman, coming 
no further. “We never made the Law.” 

“Nor me,” said young Caddies. “Your little peo- 
ple made all that before I was born. You and your 
law! What I must and what I mustn’t. No food 
for me to eat unless I work a slave, no rest, no shel- 
ter, nothin’, and you tell me ” 

“I ain’t got no business with that,” said the police- 
man. “I’m not one to argue. All I got to do is to 
carry out the law.” And he brought his second leg 
over the wall and seemed disposed to get down. 
Other policemen appeared behind him. 

“I got no quarrel with you — mind,” said young 
Caddies, with his grip tight upon his huge mace of 
iron, his face pale, and a lank explanatory great fin- 
ger to the policeman. “I got no quarrel with you. 
But — You lea ’ me alone.” 

The policeman tried to be calm and commonplace, 
with a monstrous tragedy clear before his eyes. 
“Give me the proclamation,” he said to some unseen 
follower, and a little white paper was handed to him. 

“Lea’ me alone,” said Caddies, scowling, tense, 
and drawn together. 

“This means,” said the policeman before he read, 
“go ’ome. Go ’ome to your chalk pit. If not, you’ll 
be hurt.” 

Caddies gave an inarticulate growl. 

Then when the proclamation had been read, the of- 


280 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


fleer made a sign. Four men with rifles came into 
view and took up positions of affected ease along the 
wall. They wore the uniform of the rat police. At 
the sight of the guns, young Caddies blazed into an- 
ger. He remembered the sting of the Wreckstone 
farmers’ shot-guns. “You going to shoot off those at 
me?” he said, pointing, and it seemed to the officer 
he must be afraid. 

“If you don’t march back to your pit ” 

Then in an instant the officer had slung himself 
back over the wall, and sixty feet above him the great 
electric standard whirled down to his death. Bang, 
bang, bang, went the heavy guns, and smash! the 
shattered wall, the soil and sub-soil of the garden flew. 
Something flew with it, that left red drops on one of 
the shooter’s hands. The riflemen dodged this way 
and that and turned valiantly to fire again. But 
young Caddies, already shot twice through the body, 
had spun about to find who it was had hit him so 
heavily in the back. Bang ! Bang ! He had a vision 
of houses and greenhouses and gardens, of people 
dodging at windows, the whole swaying fearfully and 
mysteriously. He seems to have made three stum- 
bling strides, to have raised and dropped his huge 
mace, and to have clutched his chest. He was stung 
and wrenched by pain. 

What was this, warm and wet, on his hand? . . . 

One man peering from a bedroom window saw his 
face, saw him staring, with a grimace of weeping dis- 
may, at the blood upon his hand, and then his knees 


ch. hi CADDLES IN LONDON 281 

bent under him, and he came crashing to the earth, 
the first of the giant nettles to fall to Caterham’s reso- 
lute clutch, the very last that he had reckoned would 
come into his hand. 


CHAPTER THE FOURTH 


redwood's two days 

I 

So soon as Caterham knew the moment for grasping 
his nettle had come, he took the law into his own 
hands and sent to arrest Cossar and Redwood. 

Redwood was there for the taking. He had been 
undergoing an operation in the side, and the doctors 
had kept all disturbing things from him until his con- 
valescence was assured. Now they had released him. 
He was just out of bed, sitting in a fire-warmed room, 
with a heap of newspapers about him, reading for 
the first time of the agitation that had swept the coun- 
try into the hands of Caterham, and of the trouble 
that was darkening over the Princess and his son. It 
was in the morning of the day when young Caddies 
died, and when the policeman tried to stop young 
Redwood on his way to the Princess. The latest 
newspapers Redwood had did but vaguely prefigure 
these imminent things. He was re-reading these first 
adumbrations of disaster with a sinking heart, read- 
ing the shadow of death more and more perceptibly 
into them, reading to occupy his mind until further 
282 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 283 

news should come. When the officers followed the 
servant into his room, he looked up eagerly. 

“I thought it was an early evening paper,” he said. 

Then standing up, and with a swift change of man- 
ner: “What’s this? . . 

After that Redwood had no news of anything for 
two days. 

They had come with a vehicle to take him away, 
but when it became evident that he was ill, it was de- 
cided to leave him for a day or so until he could be 
safely removed, and his house was taken over by the 
police and converted into a temporary prison. It was 
the same house in which Giant Redwood had been 
born and in which Herakleophorbia had for the first 
time been given to a human being, and Redwood had 
now been a widower and had lived alone in it eight 
years. 

He had become an iron-grey man, with a little 
pointed grey beard and still active brown eyes. He 
was slender and soft-voiced, as he had ever been, but 
his features had now that indefinable quality that 
comes of brooding over mighty things. To the ar- 
resting officer his appearance was in impressive con- 
trast to the enormity of his offences. “Here’s this 
feller,” said the officer in command, to his next sub- 
ordinate, “has done his level best to bust up every- 
thing, and ’e’s got a face like a quiet country gentle- 
man; and here’s Judge Hangbrow keepin’ everything 
nice and in order for every one, and ’e’s got a ’ead 
like a ’og. Then their manners ! One all considera- 


284 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

tion and the other snort and grunt. Which just 
shows you, doesn’t it, that appearances aren’t to be 
gone upon, whatever else you do.” 

But his praise of Redwood’s consideration was 
presently dashed. The officers found him trouble- 
some at first until they had made it clear that it was 
useless for him to ask questions or beg for papers. 
They made a sort of inspection of his study indeed 
and cleared away even the papers he had. Red- 
wood’s voice was high and expostulatory. “But 
don’t you see,” he said over and over again, “it’s my 
Son, my only Son, that is in this trouble. It isn’t the 
Food I care for, but my son.” 

“I wish indeed I could tell you, Sir,” said the of- 
ficer. “But our orders are strict.” 

“Who gave the orders?” cried Redwood. 

“Ah that, Sir — ” said the officer, and moved 
towards the door. . . . 

“ ’E’s going up and down ’is room,” said the sec- 
ond officer, when his superior came down. “That’s 
all right. He’ll walk it off a bit.” 

“I hope ’e will,” said the chief officer. “The fact 
is I didn’t see it in that light before, but this here 
Giant what’s been going on with the Princess, you 
know, is this man’s son.” 

The two regarded one another and the third po- 
liceman for a space. 

“Then it is a bit rough on him,” the third police- 
man said. 

It became evident that Redwood had still imper- 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 


285 

fectly apprehended the fact that an iron curtain had 
dropped between him and the outer world. They 
heard him go to the door, try the handle and rattle 
the lock, and then the voice of the officer who was sta- 
tioned on the landing telling him it was no good to 
do that. Then afterwards they heard him at the win- 
dows and saw the men outside looking up. “It’s no 
good that way,” said the second officer. Then Red- 
wood began upon the bell. The senior officer went 
up and explained very patiently that it could do no 
good to ring the bell like that, and if it was rung for 
nothing now it might have to be disregarded pres- 
ently when he had need of something. “Any reason- 
able attendance, Sir,” the officer said. “But if you 
ring it just by way of protest we shall be obliged, Sir, 
to disconnect.” 

The last word the officer heard was Redwood’s 
high pitched, “But at least you might tell me if my 
Son ” 


II 

After that Redwood spent most of his time at the 
windows. 

But the windows offered him little of the march of 
events outside. It was a quiet street at all times, and 
that day it was unusually quiet. Scarcely a cab, 
scarcely a tradesman’s cart passed all that morning. 
Now and then men went by — without any distinctive 
air of events — now and then a little group of chil- 


286 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


dren, a nursemaid and a woman going shopping, and 
so forth. They came on to the stage right or left, 
up or down the street, with an exasperating sugges- 
tion of indifference to any concerns more spacious 
than their own; they would discover the police- 
guarded house with amazement and exit in the oppo- 
site direction, where the great trusses of a giant hy- 
drangea hung across the pavement, staring back or 
pointing. Now and then a man would come and ask 
one of the policemen a question and get a curt re- 
ply. . . . 

Opposite the houses seemed dead. A housemaid 
appeared once at a bedroom window and stared for 
a space, and it occurred to Redwood to signal to her. 
For a time she watched his gestures as if with inter- 
est and made a vague response to them, then looked 
over her shoulder suddenly and turned and went 
away. An old man hobbled out of Number 37 and 
came down the steps and went off to the right, alto- 
gether without looking up. For ten minutes the only 
occupant of the road was a cat. 

With such events that interminable momentous 
morning lengthened out. 

About twelve there came a bawling of news-ven- 
dors from the adjacent road ; but it passed. Contrary 
to their wont they left Redwood’s street alone, and 
a suspicion dawned upon him that the police were 
guarding the end of the street. He tried to open the 
window, but this brought a policeman into the room 
forthwith. 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 287 

The clock of the parish church struck twelve, and 
after an abyss of time — one. 

They mocked him with lunch. 

He ate a mouthful and tumbled the food about a 
little in order to get it taken away, drank freely of 
whisky, and then took a chair and went back to the 
window. The minutes expanded into grey immensi- 
ties, and for a time perhaps he slept. . . 

He woke with a vague impression of remote con- 
cussions. He perceived a rattling of the windows 
like the quiver of an earthquake, that lasted for a 
minute or so and died away. Then after a silence it 
returned. . . . Then it died away again. He 

fancied it might be merely the passage of some heavy 
vehicle along the main road. What else could it 
be? . . . 

After a time he began to doubt whether he had 
heard this sound. 

He began to reason interminably with himself. 
Why after all was he seized? Caterham had been in 
office two days — just long enough — to grasp his Net- 
tle! Grasp his Nettle! Grasp his Giant Nettle! 
The refrain once started, sang through his mind and 
would not be dismissed. 

What after all could Caterham do? He was a 
religious man. He was bound in a sort of way by 
that not to do violence without a cause. 

Grasp his Nettle! Perhaps for example the Prin- 
cess was to be seized and sent abroad. There might 
be trouble with his son. In which case — ! But 


288 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 


why had he been arrested? Why was it necessary to 
keep him in ignorance of a thing like that? The 
thing suggested — something more extensive. 

Perhaps, for example — they meant to lay all the 
giants by the heels. They were all to be arrested to- 
gether. There had been hints of that in the election 
speeches. And then? 

No doubt thy had got Cossar also? 

Caterham was a religious man. Redwood clung to 
that. The back of his mind was a black curtain, and 
on that curtain there came and went a word — a word 
written in letters of fire. He struggled perpetually 
against that word. It was always as it were begin- 
ning to get written on the curtain and never getting 
completed. 

He faced it at last. “Massacre!’’ There was the 
word in its full brutality. 

No! No! No! It was impossible! Caterham 
was a religious man, a civilised man. And besides 
after all these years, after all these hopes ! 

Redwood sprang up; he paced the room. He 
spoke to himself; he shouted. 

“No!” 

Mankind was surely not so mad as that — surely 
not ! It was impossible, it was incredible, it could not 
be. What good would it do, to kill the giant human 
when the gigantic in all the lower things had now in- 
evitably come ? They could not be so mad as that ! 

“I must dismiss such an idea,” he said aloud; “dis- 
miss such an idea! Absolutely!” 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 289 

He pulled up short. What was that? 

Certainly the windows had rattled. He went to 
look out into the street. Opposite he saw the instant 
confirmation of his ears. At a bedroom at Number 
35 was a woman, towel in hand, and at the dining- 
room of Number 37 a man was visible behind a great 
vase of hypertrophied maidenhair fern, both staring 
out and up, both disquieted and curious. He could 
see now too quite clearly that the policeman on the 
pavement had heard it also. The thing was not his 
imagination. 

He turned to the darkling room. 

“Guns,” he said. 

He brooded. 

“Guns?” 

They brought him in strong tea, such as he was 
accustomed to have. It was evident his housekeeper 
had been taken into consultation. After drinking it, 
he was too restless to sit any longer at the window 
and he paced the room. His mind became more ca- 
pable of consecutive thought. 

The room had been his study for four and twenty 
years. It had been furnished at his marriage, and all 
the essential equipment dated from then, the large 
complex writing desk, the rotating chair, the easy 
chair at the fire, the rotating bookcase, the fixture of 
indexed pigeon-holes that filled the further recess. 
The vivid Turkey carpet, the later Victorian rugs and 
curtains had mellowed now to a rich dignity of effect, 
and copper and brass shone warm about the open fire. 


290 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


Electric lights had replaced the lamp of former days ; 
that was the chief alteration in the original equip- 
ment. But among these things his connection with 
the Food had left abundant traces. Along one wall, 
above the dado, ran a crowded array of black-framed 
photographs and photogravures, showing his son and 
Cossar’s sons and others of the Boom-children at va- 
rious ages and amidst various surroundings. Even 
young Caddies’ vacant visage had its place in that 
collection. In the corner stood a sheaf of the tassels 
of gigantic meadow grass from Cheasing Eyebright, 
and on the desk there lay three empty poppy heads as 
big as hats. The curtain rods were grass stems. And 
the tremendous skull of the great hog of Oakham 
hung, a portentous ivory overmantel, with a Chinese 
jar in either eye socket, snout down above the 
fire. . . . 

It was to the photographs that Redwood went, and 
in particular to the photographs of his son. 

They brought back countless memories of things 
that had passed out of his mind, of the early days of 
the Food, of Bensington’s timid presence, of his 
cousin Jane, of Cossar and the night work at the Ex- 
perimental Farm. These things came to him now 
very little and bright and distinct, like things seen 
through a telescope on a sunny day. And then there 
was the giant nursery, the giant childhood, the young 
giant’s first efforts to speak, his first clear signs of af- 
fection. 

Guns? 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 


291 


It flowed in on him, irresistibly, overwhelmingly, 
that outside there, outside this accursed silence and 
mystery, his son and Cossar’s sons, and all these glori- 
ous first fruits of a greater age were even now — fight- 
ing. Fighting for life ! Even now his son might be 
in some dismal quandary, cornered, wounded, over- 
come. 

He swung away from the pictures and went up and 
down the room gesticulating. “It cannot be,” he 
cried, “it cannot be. It cannot end like that!” 

“What was that?” 

He stopped, stricken rigid. 

The trembling of the windows had begun again, 
and then had come a thud — a vast concussion that 
shook the house. The concussion seemed to last for 
an age. It must have been very near. For a moment 
it seemed that something had struck the house above 
him — an enormous impact that broke into a tinkle of 
falling glass and then a stillness that ended at last 
with a minute clear sound of running feet in the street 
below. 

Those feet released him from his rigor. He 
turned towards the window and saw it starred 
and broken. 

His heart beat high with a sense of crisis, of con- 
clusive occurrence, of release. And then again, his 
realisation of impotent confinement fell about him 
like a curtain! 

He could see nothing outside except that the small 
electric lamp opposite was not lighted; he could hear 


2 9 2 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 

nothing after the first suggestion of a wide alarm. 
He could add nothing to interpret or enlarge that 
mystery except that presently there came a red- 
dish fluctuating brightness in the sky towards the 
south-east. 

This light waxed and waned. When it waned he 
doubted if it had ever waxed. It had crept upon him 
very gradually with the darkling. It became the pre- 
dominant fact in his long night of suspense. Some- 
times it seemed to him it had the quiver one associates 
with dancing flames; at others he fancied it was no 
more than the normal reflection of the evening lights. 
It waxed and waned through the long hours and only 
vanished at last when it was submerged altogether 
under the rising tide of dawn. Did it mean — ? 
What could it mean? Almost certainly it was some 
sort of fire, near or remote, but he could not even tell 
whether it was smoke or cloud drift that streamed 
across the sky. But about one o’clock there began a 
flickering of searchlights athwart that ruddy tumult, 
a flickering that continued for the rest of the night. 
That too might mean many things? What could it 
mean? What did it mean? Just this stained unrest- 
ful sky he had and the suggestion of a huge explosion 
to occupy his mind. There came no further sounds, 
no further running, nothing but a shouting that might 
have been only the distant efforts of drunken 
men. 

He did not turn up his lights; he stood at his 
draughty broken window, a distressful, slight black 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 


293 

outline to the officer who looked ever and again into 
the room and exhorted him to rest. 

All night Redwood remained at his window peering 
up at the ambiguous drift of the sky, and only with 
the coming of the dawn did he obey his fatigue and 
lie down upon the little bed they had prepared for 
him between his writing desk and the sinking fire in 
the fireplace under the great hog’s skull. 

Ill 

For thirty-six long hours did Redwood remain im- 
prisoned, closed in and shut off from the great 
drama of the Two Days, while the little people in the 
dawn of greatness fought against the Children of 
the Food. Then abruptly the iron curtain rose again 
and he found himself near the very centre of the 
struggle. That curtain rose as unexpectedly as it fell. 
In the late afternoon he was called to the window by 
the clatter of a cab, that stopped without. A young 
man descended and in another minute stood before 
him in the room, a slightly built young man of thirty 
perhaps, clean shaven, well dressed, well man- 
nered. 

“Mr. Redwood, Sir,” he began, “would you be 
willing to come to Mr. Caterham? He needs your 
presence very urgently.” 

“Needs my presence! . . There leapt a 

question into Redwood’s mind, that for a moment 
he could not put. He hesitated. Then in a voice 


294 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

that broke he asked: “What has he done to my 
Son?” and stood breathless for the reply. 

“Your Son, Sir? Your Son is doing well. So at 
least we gather.” 

“Doing well?” 

“He was wounded, Sir, yesterday. Have you not 
heard?” 

Redwood smote these pretences aside. His voice 
was no longer coloured by fear, but by anger. “You 
know I have not heard. You know I have heard 
nothing.” 

“Mr. Caterham feared, Sir — It was a time of 
upheaval. Every one — taken by surprise. He ar- 
rested you to save you, Sir, from any misadven- 
ture ” 

“He arrested me to prevent my giving any warn- 
ing or advice to my son. Go on. Tell me what has 
happened. Have you succeeded? Have you killed 
them all?” 

The young man made a pace or so towards the 
window, and turned. 

“No, Sir,” he said concisely. 

“What have you to tell me?” 

“It’s our proof, Sir, that this fighting was not 
planned by us. They found us . . . totally un- 

prepared.” 

“You mean?” 

“I mean, Sir, the giants have — to a certain extent 
— held their own.” 

The world changed for Redwood. For a moment 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 


295 

something like hysteria had the muscles of his face 
and throat. Then he gave vent to a profound “Ah !” 
His heart bounded towards exultation. “The giants 
have held their own !” 

“There has been terrible fighting — terrible de- 
struction. It is all a most hideous misunderstand- 
ing. ... In the north and midlands giants 
have been killed. . . . Everywhere.” 

“They are fighting now?” 

“No, Sir. There was a flag of truce.” 

“From them?” 

“No, Sir. Mr. Caterham sent a flag of truce. The 
whole thing is a hideous misunderstanding. That is 
why he wants to talk to you, and put his case before 
you. They insist, Sir, that you should inter- 
vene ” 

Redwood interrupted. “Do you now what hap- 
pened to my son?” he asked. 

“He was wounded.” 

“Tell me! Tell me!” 

“He and the Princess came — before the — the 
movement to surround the Cossar camp was complete 
— the Cossar pit at Chiselhurst. They came sud- 
denly, Sir, crashing through a dense thicket of giant 
oats, near River, upon a column of infantry. . . . 

Soldiers had been very nervous all day, and this pro- 
duced a panic.” 

“They shot him?” 

“No, Sir. They ran away. Some shot at him — 
wildly — against orders.” 


2 9 6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

Redwood gave a note of denial. 

“It’s true, Sir. Not on account of your son, I 
won’t pretend, but on account of the Princess.” 

“Yes. That’s true.” 

“The two giants ran shouting towards the encamp- 
ment. The soldiers ran this way and that, and then 
some began firing. They say they saw him stag- 


“Ugh!” 

“Yes, Sir. But we know he is not badly hurt.” 

“How?” 

“He sent the message, Sir, that he was doing 
well!” 

“To me?” 

“Who else, Sir?” 

Redwood stood for nearly a minute with his arms 
tightly folded, taking this in. Then his indignation 
found a voice. 

“Because you were fools in doing the thing, be- 
cause you miscalculated and blundered, you would 
like me to think you are not murderers in intention. 
And besides — The rest?” 

The young man looked interrogation. 

“The other giants?” 

The young man made no further pretence of mis- 
understanding. His tone fell. “Thirteen, Sir, are 
dead.” 

“And others wounded?” 

“Yes, Sir.” 

“And Caterham,” he gasped, “wants to meet me! 
. . . Where are the others?” 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 


297 

“Some got to the encampment during the fighting, 
Sir. . . . They seem to have known ” 

“Well, of course they did. If it hadn’t been for 
Cossar — Cossar is there?” 

“Yes, Sir. And all the surviving giants are there 
— the ones who didn’t get to the camp in the fighting 
have gone, or are going now under the flag of truce.” 

“That means,” said Redwood, “that you are 
beaten.” 

“We are not beaten. No, Sir. You cannot say 
we are beaten. But your sons have broken the rules 
of war. Once last night, and now again. After our 
attack had been withdrawn. This afternoon they be- 
gan to bombard London ” 

“That’s legitimate!” 

“They have been firing shells filled with — poison.” 

“Poison?” 

“Yes. Poison. The Food ” 

“Herakleophorbia ?” 

“Yes, Sir. Mr. Caterham, Sir ” 

“You are beaten! Of course that beats you. It’s 
Cossar ! What can you hope to do now? What good 
is it to do anything now? You will breathe it in the 
dust of every street. What is there to fight for more ? 
Rules of war, indeed! And now Caterham wants 
to humbug me to help him bargain. Good heavens, 
man! Why should I come to your exploded wind- 
bag? He has played his game . . . murdered 

and muddled. Why should I?” 

The young man stood with an air of vigilant re- 
spect. 


29B THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

“It is a fact, Sir,” he interrupted, “that the giants 
insist that they shall see you. They will have no am- 
bassador but you. Unless you come to them, I am 
afraid, Sir, there will be more bloodshed.” 

“On your side, perhaps.” 

“No, Sir — on both sides. The world is resolved 
the thing must end.” 

Redwood looked about the study. His eyes rested 
for a moment on the photograph of his boy. He 
turned and met the expectation of the young man. 

“Yes,” he said at last, “I will come.” 

IV 

His encounter with Caterham was entirely different 
from his anticipation. He had seen the man only 
twice in his life, once at dinner and once in the lobby 
of the House, and his imagination had been active not 
with the man but with the creation of the newspapers 
and caricaturists, the legendary Caterham, Jack the 
Giant-killer, Perseus, and all the rest of it. The ele- 
ment of a human personality came in to disorder all 
that. 

Here was not the face of the caricatures and por- 
traits, but the face of a worn and sleepless man, lined 
and drawn, yellow in the whites of the eyes, a little 
weakened about the mouth. Here, indeed, were the 
red brown eyes, the black hair, the distinctive aquiline 
profile of the great demagogue, but here was also 
something else that smote any premeditated scorn and 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 


299 


rhetoric aside. This man was suffering; he was suf- 
fering acutely; he was under enormous stress. From 
the beginning he had an air of impersonating himself. 
Presently, with a single gesture, the slightest move- 
ment, he revealed to Redwood that he was keeping 
himself up with drugs. He moved a thumb to his 
waistcoat pocket, and then, after a few sentences 
more, threw concealment aside, and slipped the little 
tabloid to his lips. 

Moreover, in spite of the stresses upon him, in 
spite of the fact that he was in the wrong, and Red- 
wood’s junior by a dozen years, that strange quality 
in him, the something — personal magnetism one may 
call it for want of a better name — that had won his 
way for him to this eminence of disaster was with him 
still. On that also Redwood had failed to reckon. 
From the first, so far as the course and conduct of 
their speech went, Caterham prevailed over Red- 
wood. All the quality of the first phase of their 
meeting was determined by him, all the tone and 
procedure was his. That happened as if it was a mat- 
ter of course. All Redwood’s expectations van- 
ished at his presence. He shook hands before Red- 
wood remembered that he meant to parry that fa- 
miliarity; he pitched the note of their conference from 
the outset, sure and clear, as a search for expedients 
under a common catastrophe. 

If he made any mistake it was when ever and 
again his fatigue got the better of his immediate at- 
tention, and the habit of the public meeting carried 


3 oo THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

him away. Then he drew himself up — through all 
their interview both men stood — and looked away 
from Redwood, and began to fence and justify. 
Once even he said “Gentlemen!” 

Quietly, expandingly, he began to talk. 

There were moments when Redwood ceased even 
to feel himself an interlocutor, when he became the 
mere auditor of a monologue. He became the priv- 
ileged spectator of an extraordinary phenomenon. 
He perceived something almost like a specific differ- 
ence between himself and this being whose beautiful 
voice enveloped him, who was talking, talking. This 
mind before him was so powerful and so limited. 
From its driving energy, its personal weight, its in- 
vincible oblivion to certain things, there sprang up 
in Redwood’s mind the most grotesque and strange of 
images. Instead of an antagonist who was a fellow 
creature, a man one could hold morally responsible, 
and to whom one could address reasonable appeals, 
he saw Caterham as something, something like a 
monstrous rhinoceros, as it were, a civilised rhinoc- 
eros begotten of the jungle of democratic affairs, a 
monster of irresistible onset and invincible resistance. 
In all the crashing conflicts of that tangle he was su- 
preme. And beyond? This man was a being su- 
premely adapted to make his way through multitudes 
of men. For him there was no fault so important as 
self-contradiction, no science so significant as the 
reconciliation of “interests.” Economic realities, 
topographical necessities, the barely touched mines 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 301 

of scientific expedients existed for him no more than 
railways or rifled guns or geographical literature ex- 
ist for his animal prototype. What did exist were 
gatherings, and caucuses, and votes — above all votes. 
He was votes incarnate — millions of votes. 

And now in the great crisis, with the Giants 
broken but not beaten, this vote-monster talked. 

It was so evident that even now he had everything 
to learn. He did not know there were physical laws 
and economic laws, quantities and reactions that all 
humanity voting nemine contradicente cannot vote 
away, and that are disobeyed only at the price of de- 
struction. He did not know there are moral laws 
that cannot be bent by any force of glamour, or are 
bent only to fly back with vindictive violence. In the 
face of shrapnel or the Judgment Day, it was evi- 
dent to Redwood that this man would have sheltered 
behind some curiously dodged vote of the House of 
Commons. 

What most concerned his mind now was not the 
powers that held the fastness away there to the south, 
not defeat and death, but the effect of these things 
upon his Majority, the cardinal reality in his life. 
He had to defeat the Giants or go under. 
He was by no means absolutely despairful. In this 
hour of his utmost failure, with blood and disaster 
upon his hands, and the rich promise of still more 
horrible disaster, with the gigantic destinies of the 
world towering and toppling over him, he was capa- 
ble of a belief that by sheer exertion of his voice, by 


302 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 

explaining and qualifying and restating, he might yet 
reconstitute his power. He was puzzled and dis- 
tressed no doubt, fatigued and suffering, but if only 
he could keep up, if only he could keep talking 

As he talked he seemed to Redwood to advance 
and recede, to dilate and contract. Redwood’s share 
of the talk was of the most subsidiary sort, wedges 
as it were suddenly thrust in. “That’s all nonsense.” 
“No.” “It’s no use suggesting that.” “Then why 
did you begin?” 

It is doubtful if Caterham really heard him at all. 
Round such interpolations Caterham’s speech flowed 
indeed like some swift stream about a rock. There 
this incredible man stood, on his official hearthrug, 
talking, talking with enormous power and skill, talk- 
ing as though a pause in his talk, his explanations, 
his presentation of standpoints and lights, of consid- 
erations and expedients, would permit some antago- 
nistic influence to leap into being — into vocal being, 
the only being he could comprehend. There he stood 
amidst the slightly faded splendours of that official 
room in which one man after another had succumbed 
to the belief that a certain power of intervention was 
the creative control of an empire. . . . 

The more he talked the more certain Redwood’s 
sense of stupendous futility grew. Did this man 
realise that while he stood and talked there, the 
whole great world was moving, that the invincible 
tide of growth flowed and flowed, that there were 
any hours but parliamentary hours, or any weapons 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 


3°3 


in the hands of the Avengers of Blood? Outside, 
darkling the whole room, a single leaf of giant Vir- 
ginian creeper tapped unheeded on the pane. 

Redwood became anxious to end this amazing 
monologue, to escape to sanity and judgment, to that 
beleaguered camp, the fastness of the future, where, 
at the very nucleus of greatness, the Sons were gath- 
ered together. For that this talking was endured. 
He had a curious impression that unless this mono- 
logue ended he would presently find himself carried 
away by it, that he must fight against Caterham’s 
voice as one fights against a drug. Facts had altered 
and were altering beneath that spell. 

What was the man saying? 

Since Redwood had to report it to the Children of 
the Food, in a sort of way he perceived it did mat- 
ter. He would have to listen and guard his sense of 
realities as well as he could. 

Much about bloodguiltiness. That was eloquence. 
That didn’t matter. Next? 

He was suggesting a convention ! 

He was suggesting that the surviving Children of 
the Food should capitulate and go apart and form a 
community of their own. There were precedents, 
he said, for this. “We would assign them terri- 
tory ” 

“Where?” interjected Redwood, stooping to 
argue. 

Caterham snatched at that concession. He turned 
his face to Redwood’s, and his voice fell to a per- 


3 ° 4 


THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 


suasive reasonableness. That could be determined. 
That he contended was a quite subsidiary question. 
Then he went on to stipulate: “And except for them 
and where they are we must have absolute control, 
the Food and all the Fruits of the Food must be 
stamped out ” 

Redwood found himself bargaining: “The Prin- 
cess?” 

“She stands apart.” 

“No,” said Redwood, struggling to get back to 
the old footing. “That’s absurd.” 

“That afterwards. At any rate we are agreed 
that the making of the Food must stop ” 

“I have agreed to nothing. I have said noth- 
ing ” 

“But on one planet, to have two races of men, one 
great, one small! Consider what has happened! 
Consider that is but a little foretaste of what might 
presently happen if this Food has its way! Consider 
all you have already brought upon this world! If 
there is to be a race of giants, increasing and multi- 
plying ” 

“It is not for me to argue,” said Redwood. “I 
must go to our sons. I want to go to my son. That 
is why I have come to you. Tell me exactly what you 
offer.” 

Caterham made a speech upon his terms. 

The Children of the Food were to be given a great 
reservation — in North America perhaps or Africa — 
in which they might live out their lives in their own 
fashion. 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 


3°5 


“But it’s nonsense,” said Redwood. “There are 
other giants now abroad. All over Europe — here 
and there !” 

“There could be an international convention. It’s 
not impossible. Something of the sort indeed has al- 
ready been spoken of. . . . But in this reserva- 

tion they can live out their own lives in their own 
way. They may do what they like; they may make 
what they like. We shall be glad if they will make 
us things. They may be happy. Think!” 

“Provided there are no more children.” 

“Precisely. The children are for us. And so, Sir, 
we shall save the world, we shall save it absolutely 
from the fruits of your terrible discovery. It is not 
too late for us. Only we are eager to temper expe- 
diency with mercy. Even now we are burning and 
searing the places their shells hit yesterday. We 
can get it under. Trust me we shall get it under. 
But in that way, without cruelty, without injus- 
tice ” 

“And suppose the Children do not agree?” 

For the first time Caterham looked Redwood fully 
in the face. 

“They must!” 

“I don’t think they will.” 

“Why should they not agree?” he asked, in richly 
toned amazement. 

“Suppose they don’t?” 

“What can it be but war? We cannot have the 
thing go on. We cannot, Sir. Have you scientific 


3 o6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

men no imagination? Have you no mercy? We 
cannot have our world trampled under a growing 
herd of such monsters and monstrous growths as 
your food has made. We cannot and we cannot ! I 
ask you, Sir, what can it be but war? And remem- 
ber — this that has happened is only a beginning! 
This was a skirmish. A mere affair of police. Be- 
lieve me, a mere affair of police. Do not be cheated 
by perspective, by the immediate bigness of these 
newer things. Behind us is the nation — is humanity. 
Behind the thousands who have died .there are mill- 
ions. Were it not for the fear of bloodshed, Sir, 
behind our first attacks there would be forming other 
attacks, even now. Whether we can kill this Food or 
not, most assuredly we can kill your sons! You 
reckon too much on the things of yesterday, on the 
happenings of a mere score of years, on one battle. 
You have no sense of the slow course of history. I 
offer this convention for the sake of lives, not be- 
cause it can change the inevitable end. If you think 
that your poor two dozen of giants can resist all the 
forces of our people and of all the alien peoples who 
will come to our aid; if you think you can change 
Humanity at a blow, in a single generation, and alter 

the nature and stature of Man ” 

He flung out an arm. “Go to them now, Sir! See 
them, for all the evil they have done, crouching 

among their wounded ” 

He stopped, as though he had glanced at Red- 
wood’s son by chance. 


ch. iv REDWOOD’S TWO DAYS 


307 


There came a pause. 

“Go to them,” he said. 

“That is what I want to do.” 

“Then go now. . . .” 

He turned and pressed the button of a bell ; with- 
out, in immediate response, came a sound of opening 
doors and hastening feet. 

The talk was at an end. The display was over. 
Abruptly Caterham seemed to contract, to shrivel 
up into a yellow-faced, fagged-out, middle-sized, 
middle-aged man. He stepped forward, as if 
he were stepping out of a picture, and with a 
complete assumption of that friendliness that lies be- 
hind all the public conflicts of our race, he held out 
his hand to Redwood. 

As if it were a matter of course, Redwood shook 
hands with him for the second time. 


CHAPTER THE FIFTH 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 

I 

Presently Redwood found himself in a train going 
south over the Thames. He had a brief vision of 
the river shining under its lights, and of the smoke 
still going up from the place where the shell had 
fallen on the north bank, and where a vast multitude 
of men had been organised to burn the Herakleo- 
phorbia out of the ground. The southern bank was 
dark, for some reason even the streets were not lit, 
all that was clearly visible was the outlines of the 
tall alarm-towers and the dark bulks of flats and 
schools, and after a minute of peering scrutiny he 
turned his back on the window and sank into thought. 
There was nothing more to see or do until he saw 
the Sons. . . . 

He was fatigued by the stresses of the last two 
days ; it seemed to him that his emotions must needs 
be exhausted, but he had fortified himself with strong 
coffee before starting, and his thoughts ran thin and 
clear. His mind touched many things. He reviewed 
again, but now in the enlightenment of accomplished 
308 


ch. v THE GIANT LEAGUER 309 

events, the manner in which the Food had entered 
and unfolded itself in the world. 

Bensington thought it might be an excellent food 
for infants, ’ he whispered to himself, with a faint 
smile. Then there came into his mind as vivid as if 
they were still unsettled his own horrible doubts after 
he had committed himself by giving it to his own son. 
From that, with a steady unfaltering expansion, in 
spite of every effort of men to help and hinder, the 
Food had spread through the whole world of man. 
And now? 

“Even if they kill them all,” Redwood whispered, 
“the thing is done.” 

The secret of its making was known far and wide. 
That had been his own work. Plants, animals, a 
multitude of distressful growing children would con- 
spire irresistibly to force the world to revert again 
to the Food, whatever happened in the present strug- 
gle. “The thing is done,” he said, with his mind 
swinging round beyond all his controlling to rest 
upon the present fate of the Children and his son. 
Would he find them exhausted by the efforts of the 
battle, wounded, starving, on the verge of defeat, or 
would he find them still stout and hopeful, ready for 
the still grimmer conflict of the morrow? . . . 

His son was wounded ! But he had sent a message ! 

His mind came back to his interview with Cater- 
ham. 

He was roused from his thoughts by the stopping 
of his train in Chiselhurst station. He recognised 


3 io THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. m 

the place by the huge rat alarm-tower that crested 
Camden Hill, and the row of blossoming giant hem- 
locks that lined the road. . . . 

Caterham’s private secretary came to him from 
the other carriage and told him that half a mile fur- 
ther the line had been wrecked and that the rest of 
the journey was to be made in a motor car. Red- 
wood descended upon a platform lit only by a hand 
lantern and swept by the cool night breeze. The 
quiet of that derelict, wood-set, weed-embedded 
suburb — for all the inhabitants had taken refuge in 
London at the outbreak of yesterday’s conflict — be- 
came instantly impressive. His conductor took him 
down the steps to where a motor car was waiting 
with blazing lights — the only lights to be seen — 
handed him over to the care of the driver and bade 
him farewell. 

“You will do your best for us,” he said, with an 
imitation of his master’s manner, as he held Red- 
wood’s hand. 

So soon as Redwood could be wrapped about, they 
started out into the night. At one moment they 
stood still, and then the motor car was rushing softly 
and swiftly down the station incline. They turned 
one corner and another, followed the windings of a 
lane of villas, and then before them stretched the 
road. The motor droned up to its topmost speed, 
and the black night swept past them. Everything 
was very dark under the starlight, and the whole 
world crouched mysteriously and was gone without 


ch. y 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3 1 1 


a sound. Not a breath stirred the flying things by 
the wayside; the deserted, pallid white villas on 
either hand with their black unlit windows reminded 
him of a noiseless procession of skulls. The driver 
beside him was a silent man, or stricken into silence 
by the conditions of his journey. He answered Red- 
wood’s brief questions in monosyllables, and gruffly. 
Athwart the southern sky the beams of searchlights 
waved noiseless passes; the sole strange evidences of 
life they seemed in all that derelict world about the 
hurrying machine. 

The road was presently bordered on either side by 
gigantic blackthorn shoots that made it very dark, 
and by tall grass and big campions, huge giant dead- 
nettles as high as trees, flickering past darkly in sil- 
houette overhead. Beyond Keston they came to a 
rising hill, and the driver went slow. At the crest 
he stopped. The engine throbbed and became still. 
“There,” he said, and his big gloved finger pointed, 
a black misshapen thing, before Redwood’s eyes. 

Far away as it seemed the great embankment, 
crested by the blaze from which the searchlights 
sprang, rose up against the sky. Those beams went 
and came among the clouds and the hilly land 
about them as if they traced mysterious incanta- 
tions. 

“I don’t know,” said the driver at last, and it was 
clear he was afraid to go on. 

Presently a searchlight swept down the sky to 
them, stopped as it were with a start, scrutinised 


3 I2 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

them, a blinding stare confused rather than mitigated 
by an intervening monstrous weed stem or so. They 
sat with their gloves held over their eyes, trying to 
look under them and meet that light. 

“Go on,” said Redwood after a while. 

The driver still had his doubts ; he tried to express 
them and died down to “I don’t know” again. 

At last he ventured on. “Here goes,” he said, and 
roused his machinery to motion again, followed in- 
tently by that great white eye. 

To Redwood it seemed for a long time they were 
no longer on earth, but in a state of palpitating hurry 
through a luminous cloud. Teuf, teuf, teuf, teuf, 
went the machine, and ever and again — obeying I 
know not what nervous impulse — the driver sounded 
his horn. 

They passed into the welcome darkness of a high- 
fenced lane, and down into a hollow and past some 
houses into that blinding stare again. Then for a 
space the road ran naked across a down, and 
they seemed to hang throbbing in immensity. Once 
more giant weeds rose about them and whirled 
past. Then quite abruptly close upon them loomed 
the figure of a giant, shining brightly where the 
searchlight caught him below and black against the 
sky above. “Hullo there!” he cried, and “stop! 
There’s no more road beyond. ... Is that 
Father Redwood?” 

Redwood stood up and gave a vague shout by way 
of answer, and then Cossar was in the road beside 


CH. V 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3 l 3 


him, gripping both hands with both of his and pull- 
ing him out of the car. 

“What of my son?” asked Redwood. 

“He’s all right,” said Cossar. “They’ve hurt 
nothing serious in him 

“And your lads?” 

“Well. All of them, well. But we’ve had to 
make a fight for it.” 

The giant was saying something to the motor 
driver. Redwood stood aside as the machine wheeled 
round, and then suddenly Cossar vanished, every- 
thing vanished, and he was in absolute darkness for 
a space. The glare was following the motor back to 
the crest of the Keston hill. He watched the little 
conveyance receding in that white halo. It had a 
curious effect, as though it was not moving at all and 
the halo was. A group of war-blasted giant elders 
flashed into gaunt scarred gesticulations and were 
swallowed again by the night. . . . Redwood 

turned to Cossar’s dim outline again and clasped his 
hand. “I have been shut up and kept in ignorance,” 
he said, “for two whole days.” 

“We fired the Food at them,” said Cossar. “Ob- 
viously! Thirty shots. Eh!” 

“I come from Caterham.” 

“I know you do.” He laughed with a note of bit- 
terness. “I suppose he’s wiping it up.” 


3i4 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

II 

“Where is my son?” said Redwood. 

“He is all right. The giants are waiting for your 
message.” 

“Yes, but my son . . .” 

He passed with Cossar down a long slanting tun- 
nel that was lit red for a moment and then became 
dark again, and came out presently into the great pit 
of shelter the giants had made. 

Redwood’s first impression was of an enormous 
arena bounded by very high cliffs and with its floor 
greatly encumbered. It was in darkness save for the 
passing reflections of the watchman’s searchlights 
that whirled perpetually high overhead, and for a 
red glow that came and went from a distant corner 
where two giants worked together amidst a metallic 
clangour. Against the sky, as the glare came about, 
his eye caught the familiar outlines of the old work- 
sheds and playsheds that were made for the Cossar 
boys. They were hanging now, as it were, at a cliff 
brow, and strangely twisted and distorted with the 
guns of Caterham’s bombardment. There were sug- 
gestions of huge gun emplacements above there, and 
nearer were piles of mighty cylinders that were per- 
haps ammunition. All about the wide space below, 
the forms of great engines and incomprehensible 
bulks were scattered in vague disorder. The giants 
appeared and vanished among these masses and in 


ch. y 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3 J 5 


the uncertain light; great shapes they were, not dis- 
proportionate to the things amidst which they moved. 
Some were actively employed, some sitting and lying 
as if they courted sleep, and one near at hand, whose 
body was bandaged, lay on a rough litter of pine 
boughs and was certainly asleep. Redwood peered 
at these dim forms; his eyes went from one stirring 
outline to another. 

“Where is my son, Cossar?” 

Then he saw him. 

His son was sitting under the shadow of a great 
wall of steel. He presented himself as a black shape 
recognisable only by his pose — his features were in- 
visible. He sat chin upon hand, as though weary or 
lost in thought. Beside him Redwood discovered the 
figure of the Princess, the dark suggestion of her 
merely, and then, as the glow from the distant iron 
returned, he saw for an instant, red lit and tender, 
the infinite kindliness of her shadowed face. She 
stood looking down upon her lover with her hand 
resting against the steel. It seemed that she whis- 
pered to him. 

Redwood would have gone towards them. 

“Presently,” said Cossar. “First there is your 
message.” 

“Yes,” said Redwood, “but ” 

He stopped. His son was now looking up and 
speaking to the Princess, but in too low a tone for 
them to hear. Young Redwood raised his face and 
she bent down towards him, and glanced aside before 
she spoke. 


3 1 6 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

“But if we are beaten,” they heard the whispered 
voice of young Redwood. 

She paused, and the red blaze showed her eyes 
bright with unshed tears. She bent nearer him and 
spoke still lower. There was something so intimate 
and private in their bearing, in their soft tones, that 
Redwood, Redwood who had thought for two whole 
days of nothing but his son, felt himself intrusive 
there. Abruptly he was checked. For the first time 
in his life perhaps he realised how much more a son 
may be to his father than a father can ever be to a 
son; he realised the full predominance of the future 
over the past. Here between these two he had no 
part. His part was played. He turned to Cossar, 
in the instant realisation. Their eyes met. His 
voice was changed to the tone of a grey resolve. 

“I will deliver my message now,” he said. “After- 
wards — ... It will be soon enough then.” 

The pit was so enormous and so encumbered that 
it was a long and tortuous route to the place from 
which Redwood could speak to them all. 

He and Cossar followed a steeply descending way 
that passed beneath an arch of interlocking machin- 
ery, and so came into a vast deep gangway that ran 
athwart the bottom of the pit. This gangway, wide 
and vacant, and yet relatively narrow, conspired with 
everything about it to enhance Redwood’s sense of 
his own littleness. It became as it were an excavated 
gorge. High overhead, separated from him by cliffs 
of darkness, the searchlights wheeled and blazed, and 


CH. V 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3U 


the shining shapes went to and fro. Giant voices 
called to one another above there, calling the giants 
together to the Council of War, to hear the terms 
that Caterham had sent. The gangway still inclined 
downward towards black vastnesses, towards shad- 
ows and mysteries and inconceivable things, into 
which Redwood went slowly with reluctant footsteps 
and Cossar with a confident stride. . . . 

Redwood’s thoughts were busy. 

The two men passed into the completest darkness, 
and Cossar took his companion’s wrist. They went 
now slowly perforce. 

Redwood was moved to speak. “All this,” he 
said, “is strange.” 

“Big,” said Cossar. 

“Strange. And strange that it should be strange 
to me — I, who am, in a sense, the beginning of it 

all. It’s ” 

He stopped, wrestling with his elusive meaning, 
and threw an unseen gesture at the cliff. 

“I have not thought of it before. I have been 
busy, and the years have passed. But here I see — 
It is a new generation, Cossar, and new emotions and 
new needs. All this, Cossar ” 

Cossar saw now his dim gesture to the things about 
them. 

“All this is Youth.” 

Cossar made no answer, and his irregular foot- 
falls went striding on. 

“It isn’t our youth, Cossar. They are taking 


3 1 8 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. m 

things over. They are beginning upon their own 
emotions, their own experiences, their own way. We 
have made a new world, and it isn’t ours. This great 
place ” 

“I planned it,” said Cossar, his face close. 

“But now?” 

“Ah! I have given it to my sons.” 

Redwood could feel the loose wave of the arm 
that he could not see. 

“That is it. We are over — or almost over.” 

“Your message !” 

“Yes. And then ” 

“We’re over.” 

“Well ?” 

“Of course we are out of it, we two old men,” said 
Cossar, with his familiar note of sudden anger. “Of 
course we are. Obviously. Each man for his own 
time. And now — it’s their time beginning. That’s 
all right. Excavator’s gang. We do our job and go. 
See? That is what Death is for. We work out all 
our little brains and all our little emotions, and then 
this lot begins afresh. Fresh and fresh! Perfectly 
simple. What’s the trouble?” 

He paused to guide Redwood to some steps. 

“Yes,” said Redwood, “but one feels ” 

He left his sentence incomplete. 

“That is what Death is for.” He heard Cossar 
insisting below him. “How else could the thing be 
done? That is what Death is for.” 


CII. V 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3*9 


III 

After devious windings and ascents they came out 
upon a projecting ledge from which it was possible 
to see over the greater extent of the giants’ pit, and 
from which Redwood might make himself heard by 
the whole of their assembly. The giants were al- 
ready gathered below and about him at different 
levels, to hear the message he had to deliver. The 
eldest son of Cossar stood on the bank overhead 
watching the revelations of the searchlights, for they 
feared a breach of the truce. The workers at the 
great apparatus in the corner stood out clear in their 
own light; they were near stripped; they turned their 
faces towards Redwood, but with a watchful refer- 
ence ever and again to the castings that they could 
not leave. He saw these nearer figures with a fluc- 
tuating indistinctness, by lights that came and went, 
and the remoter ones still less distinctly. They came 
from and vanished again into the depths of great ob- 
scurities. For these giants had no more light than 
they could help in the pit, that their eyes might be 
ready to see effectually any attacking force that might 
spring upon them out of the darknesses around. 

Ever and again some chance glare would pick out 
and display this group or that of tall and powerful 
forms, the giants from Sunderland clothed in over- 
lapping metal plates, and the others clad in leather, 
in woven rope or in woven metal, as their conditions 


320 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 

had determined. They sat amidst or rested their 
hands upon, or stood erect among machines and 
weapons as mighty as themselves, and all their faces, 
as they came and went from visible to invisible, had 
steadfast eyes. 

He made an effort to begin and did not do so. 
Then for a moment his son’s face glowed out in a hot 
insurgence of the fire, his son’s face looking up to 
him, tender as well as strong; and at that he found 
a voice to reach them all, speaking across a gulf as 
it were to his son. 

“I come from Caterham,” he said. “He sent me 
to you, to tell you the terms he offers.” 

He paused. “They are impossible terms I know, 
now that I see you here all together ; they are impos- 
sible terms, but I brought them to you, because I 
wanted to see you all — and my son. Once more. 

I wanted to see my son. . . 

“Tell them the terms,” said Cossar. 

“This is what Caterham offers. He wants you to 
go apart and leave his world!” 

“Where?” 

“He does not know. Vaguely somewhere in the 
world a great region is to be set apart. . . . And 

you are to make no more of the Food, to have no 
children of your own, to live in your own way for 
your own time, and then to end forever.” 

He stopped. 

“And that is all?” 

“That is all.” 


CH. V 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3 21 


There followed a great stillness. The darkness 
that veiled the giants seemed to look thoughtfully at 
him. 

He felt a touch at his elbow, and Cossar was hold- 
ing a chair for him — a queer fragment of doll’s fur- 
niture amidst these piled immensities. He sat down 
and crossed his legs, and then put one across the knee 
of the other, and clutched his boot nervously, and felt 
small and self-conscious and acutely visible and ab- 
surdly placed. 

Then at the sound of a voice he forgot himself 
again. 

“You have heard, Brothers,” said this voice out 
of the shadows. 

And another answered, “We have heard.” 

“And the answer, Brothers?” 

“To Caterham?” 

“Is No!” 

“And then?” 

There was a silence for the space of some seconds. 

Then a voice said : “These people are right. After 
their lights, that is. They have been right in killing 
all that grew larger than its kind, beast and plant 
and all manner of great things that arose. They 
were right in trying to massacre us. They are right 
now in saying we must not marry our kind. Accord- 
ing to their lights they are right. They know — it is 
time that we also knew — that you cannot have pig- 
mies and giants in one world together. Caterham 
has said that again and again — clearly — their world 


or ours. 


3 22 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. m 

“We are not half a hundred now,” said another, 
“and they are endless millions.” 

“So it may be. But the thing is as I have said.” 

Then another long silence. 

“And are we to die then?” 

“God forbid!” 

“Are they?” 

“No.” 

“But that is what Caterham says ! He would have 
us live out our lives, die one by one, till only one re- 
mains, and that one at last would die also, and they 
would cut down all the giant plants and weeds, kill 
all the giant underlife, burn out the traces of the 
Food — make an end to us and to the Food forever. 
Then the little pigmy world would be safe. They 
would go on — safe for ever, living their little pigmy 
lives, doing pigmy kindnesses and pigmy cruelties 
each to the other; they might even perhaps attain a 
sort of pigmy millenium, make an end to war, make 
an end to over-population, sit down in a world-wide 
city to practise pigmy arts, worshipping one another 
till the world begins to freeze. . . .” 

In the corner a sheet of iron fell in thunder to the 
ground. 

“Brothers, we know what we mean to do.” 

In a spluttering of light from the searchlights Red- 
wood saw earnest youthful faces turning to his son. 

“It is easy now to make the Food. It would be 
easy for us to make Food for all the world.” 

“You mean, Brother Redwood,” said a voice out 


CH. V 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3 2 3 


of the darkness, “that it is for the little people to eat 
the Food.” 

“What else is there to do?” 

“We are not half a hundred and they are many 
millions.” 

“But we held our own.” 

“So far.” 

“If it is God’s will, we may still hold our own.” 

“Yes. But think of the dead!” 

Another voice took up the strain. “The dead,” 
it said. “Think of the unborn. . . .” 

“Brothers,” came the voice of young Redwood, 
“what can we do but fight them, and if we beat them, 
make them take the Food? They cannot help but 
take the Food now. Suppose we were to resign our 
heritage and do this folly that Caterham suggests! 
Suppose we could! Suppose we give up this great 
thing that stirs within us, repudiate this thing our 
fathers did for us, that you , Father, did for us, and 
pass, when our time has come, into decay and noth- 
ingness! What then? Will this little world of 
theirs be as it was before? They may fight against 
* greatness in us who are the children of men, but can 
they conquer? Even if they should destroy us every 
one, what then? Would it save them? No! For 
greatness is abroad, not only in us, not only in the 
Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the 
nature of all things, it is part of space and time. To 
grow and still to grow, from first to last that is Being, 
that is the law of life. What other law can there 
be?” 


3 2 4 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. iii 

“To help others?” 

“To grow. It is still, to grow. Unless we help 
them to fail. . . .” 

“They will fight hard to overcome us,” said a 
voice. 

And another, “What of that?” 

“They will fight,” said young Redwood. “If we 
refuse these terms, I doubt not they will fight. In- 
deed I hope they will be open and fight. If after all 
they offer peace, it will be only the better to catch us 
unawares. Make no mistake, Brothers; in some way 
or other they will fight. The war has begun, and we 
must fight to the end. Unless we are wise, we may 
find presently we have lived only to make them better 
weapons against our children and our kind. This, 
so far, has been only the dawn of battle. All our 
lives will be a battle. Some of us will be killed in bat- 
tle, some of us will be waylaid. There is no easy vic- 
tory, no victory whatever that is not more than half 
defeat for us. Be sure of that. What of that? If 
only we keep a foothold, if only we leave behind us 
a growing host to fight when we are gone!” 

“And to-morrow?” 

“We will scatter the Food; we will saturate the 
world with the Food.” 

“Suppose they come to terms?” 

“Our terms are the Food. It is not as though lit- 
tle and great could live together in any perfection of 
compromise. It is one thing or the other. What 
right have parents to say, my child shall have no 


CH. V 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3 2 5 


light but the light I have had, shall grow no greater 
than the greatness to which I have grown? Do I 
speak for you, Brothers?” 

Assenting murmurs answered him. 

“And to the children who will be women as well 
as to the children who will be men,” said a voice from 
the darkness. 

“Even more so — to be mothers of a new race. . .” 

“But for the next generation there must be great 
and. little,” said Redwood, with his eyes on his son’s 
face. 

“For many generations. And the little will ham- 
per the great and the great press upon the little. So 
it must needs be, Father.” 

“There will be conflict.” 

“Endless conflict. Endless misunderstanding. All 
life is that. Great and little cannot understand one 
another. But in every child born of man, Father 
Redwood, lurks some seed of greatness — waiting for 
the Food.” 

“Then I am to go to Caterham again and tell 
him ” 

“You will stay with us, Father Redwood. Our 
answer goes to Caterham at dawn.” 

“He says that he will fight. . . .” 

“So be it,” said young Redwood, and his brethren 
murmured assent. 

“ The iron waits,” cried a voice, and the two 
giants who were working in the corner began a 
rhythmic hammering that made a mighty music to 


326 1 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

the scene. The metal glowed out far more brightly 
than it had done before, and gave Redwood a clearer 
view of the encampment than had yet come to him. 
He saw the oblong space to its full extent, with the 
great engines of warfare ranged ready to hand. Be- 
yond, and at a higher level, the house of the Cossars 
stood. About him were the young giants, huge 
and beautiful, glittering in their mail, amidst the 
preparations for the morrow. The sight of them 
lifted his heart. They were so easily powerful! 
They were so tall and gracious ! They were so stead- 
fast in their movements ! There was his son amongst 
them, and the first of all giant women, the Prin- 
cess. 

There leapt into his mind the oddest contrast, a 
memory of Bensington, very bright and little — Ben- 
sington with his hand amidst the soft breast feath- 
ers of that first great chick, standing in that conven- 
tionally furnished room of his, peering over his spec- 
tacles dubiously as Cousin Jane banged the door. . . 

It had all happened in a yesterday of one and 
twenty years. 

Then suddenly a strange doubt took hold of him, 
that this place and present greatness were but the 
texture of a dream; that he was dreaming and would 
in an instant wake to find himself in his study again, 
the giants slaughtered, the Food suppressed, and 
himself a prisoner locked in. What else indeed was 
life but that — always to be a prisoner locked in! 
This was the culmination and end of his dream. He 


ch. v 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3 2 7 


would wake through bloodshed and battle, to find his 
Food the most foolish of fancies, and his hopes and 
faith of a greater world to come no more than the 
coloured film upon a pool of bottomless decay. Lit- 
tleness invincible! . . . 

So strong and deep was this wave of despondency, 
this suggestion of impending disillusionment, that he 
started to his feet. He stood and pressed his 
clenched fists into his eyes, and so for a moment re- 
mained, fearing to open them again and see, lest 
the dream should already have passed away. . . . 

The voice of the giant children spoke to one an- 
other, an undertone to that clangorous melody of the 
smiths. His tide of doubt ebbed. He heard the 
giant voices; he heard their movements about him 
still. It was real, surely it was real — as real as spite- 
ful acts! More real, for these great things, it may 
be, are the coming things, and the littleness, bestial- 
ity, and infirmity of men are the things that go. He 
opened his eyes. 

“Done,” cried one of the two ironworkers, and 
they flung their hammers down. 

A voice sounded above. The son of Cossar stand- 
ing on the great embankment had turned and was 
now speaking to them all. 

“It is not that we would oust the little people from 
the world,” he said, “in order that we, who are no 
more than one step upwards from their littleness, 
may hold their world for ever. It is the step we fight 
for and not ourselves. . . . We are here, 


328 THE DAWN OF THE FOOD bk. hi 

Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the 
purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We 
fight not for ourselves — for we are but the momen- 
tary hands and eyes of the Life of the World. So 
you, Father Redwood, taught us. Through us and 
through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. 
From us by word and birth and act it must pass — to 
still greater lives. This earth is no resting place ; this 
earth is no playing place, else indeed we might 
put our throats to the little people’s knife, hav- 
ing no greater right to live than they. And 
they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin. 
We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth 
that goes on for ever. To-morrow, whether we live 
or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the 
law of the spirit for ever more. To grow according 
to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks 
and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, 
into greatness and the light! Greater,” he said, 
speaking with slow deliberation, “greater, my Broth- 
ers! And then — still greater. To grow and again 
— to grow. To grow at last into the fellow- 
ship and understanding of God. Growing. . . . 
Till the earth is no more than a footstool. 

Till the spirit shall have driven fear into nothing- 
ness, and spread. . . He swung his arm 

heavenward — “T here!” 

His voice ceased. The white glare of one of the 
searchlights wheeled about, and for a moment fell 
upon him, standing out gigantic with hand upraised 
against the sky. 


CH. V 


THE GIANT LEAGUER 


3 2 9 


For one instant he shone, looking up fearlessly into 
the starry deeps, mail-clad, young and strong, reso- 
lute and still. Then the light had passed and he was 
no more than a great black outline against the starry 
sky, a great black outline that threatened with one 
mighty gesture the firmament of heaven and all its 
multitude of stars. 


THE END 






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